So day one, I sit down, wave my payroll sceptre and make steve draw me a diagram of all the payroll inter-pendencies. What I got was not unlike what you see in the last comment, it sorta looked like a bowl of steaming spaghetti with bits of alphabet soup floating in it. So my second order to steve? “GIVE UP!! START LOOKING FOR NEW JOB!!”
It was at that point I decided the project was a complete disaster, and I immediately went on “work embargo”. I even had a sign above my desk that said “Embargo ON” and when people would ask me questions or ask me how the project was going I would point to the sign and go back to surfing the internet. If I was particularly surly that day, I would squeel “EMBARGO ON!!” just like master-blaster in thunderdome. The funny thing was, everyone thought I was kidding, they thought I was just eccentric or something. Little did they know how screwed we were, how messed up this project was.

3 weeks later I had quit, and steve left 2 weeks after that.

Never found out how that project ended.

Never really cared.

My advice to newbies just starting their careers: If they dangle the payroll carrot in front of your face and promise you a life of promotions and good living.. you run.. you run FAST.

When I was at P&W they outsourced all our COBOL Y2K analysis to a crack team of Israeli programmers who’d already proved their muster battling the fabulous Y-9-Billion bug, or whatever year it is in Israel. About a year before I got there, there was a team of about 4 COBOL programmers who had been there since the dawn of time, all of whom possessed super heroic space bending mind powers and intimate knowledge of the secret workings behind Pratt’s largely undocumented legacy systems. Sometime during this period they joined forces with the Israelis to tag team battle the fearsome and loathsome Y2K “Bug”. But when I arrived at P&W, the time of heroes had ended, and history had given way to myth. All that remained of these 4 alien super computer COBOL Kill-Bots was their tales passed on in song by the 4 loafing buffoons and fat-heads that had replaced them (myself included). Like clockwork, the issue of Y2K compliancy would erupt at each of our (what seemed like hourly) staff meetings. Sporting my most insolent slack jawed visage I would tirelessly prod, poke, and spindle at whatever was in my reach until one of my compatriots would produce a Mandolin and recount the tale of the day when the 4 steel munching COBOL demi-gorgons weaved a giant space laser-bat out of Israelis and used it to fire a hailstorm of dynamite into the heart of planet Y2K. But our comfortable security was not to last, when one day several months later………….

[TO BE CONTINUED]