Former 3rd Shift (Score 1)

It has been more than 15 years since I was a mainframe operator (IBM 360/50 running EDOS/VS) at the university. We did all the business processing for the school (accounting, payroll, alumni stuff, student and course tracking, etc.) and some local payroll and mailing lists as well.

I was trained apprentice style and it took more than a year because you don't SEE some jobs more than once in a year and some jobs had their own quirks. Plus some programmers (or rather JCL coders) would mistype their JCL and you had know if you should call them if the job (not the OS) bombed so you could change it and rerun it or just stuff it in their bin. The bigest fear was a power outage (we couldn't afford a backup generator) from electrical storms or kamikaze squirrels who take out transformers (it really happened). When that happens you are suddenly sitting in the very quiet darkness.

It could be mind numbing but as a student it was a blessing. I ran my class project programs (Assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL), anytime I wanted (everyone knew me in the center) while most students had only two runs a day. In addition, when we got a DEC PDP11/45 there was a terminal in the machine room as well (I had to do backups) so I had unlimited access there as well.

The mind altering part is the work consisted mainly in loading decks of punch cards, changing disks (20mb in huge 15 or 20 inch multi-platter packs), tape (9 track 1200 bpi), and paper; and it was mostly paper. Some jobs cranked for hours and spit out two pages (header and EOJ). Others ran quickly and printed all weekend (end of year general ledger). But printing 5 boxes of paper (with no, or 1-5 parts i.e. up to 4 carbons) a weekend was about normal. But that still leaves lots of hours sitting in the room LISTENING to all those blowers in a room illuminated by floresent lights watching the LEDs flicker on the panel. It got to the point that I could tell when a job was finishing up by the pattern flashing. In fact there were many times I dozed off only to awake JUST before a job finished up. No ESP, just the sound of 9 track tape drives rewinding....

Perhaps these people should not be searching in the IS field because you don't need to know the theory and you can teach this to anyone who wants to keep a job.