This sample of writing demonstrates the telling of a personal tail. This is much longer than a blog post, but hopefully succeeds in describing a situation that is totally foreign to the reader, told in such a manner that the reader enjoys.
My first job leading to my career in computers
I was filling ink wells at a bank in 1963. First National used NCR Postronic machines for their checking accounts. The mechanism was state of the art, about the size and shape of a closed roll-top desk with a bank of old-style adding machine keys on the front. The keys were were on rows and columns running from bottom to top - 0 to 9, and left to right from a hundred million to a penny. (Found a picture.)
There was a slot in the Postronic that would accommodate a sheet of paper, 11 inches tall and 17 wide. The organization of the sheet was in a ledger or statement format, duplicated so that if you cut the sheet in half vertically, you had two identical statements, one for the account holder, and one for the bank.
The real technology was on the back of the bank half of the ledger sheet. There you saw several rows of magnetic black stripes. The stripes recorded transaction activity as well as the row location on the sheet the next transaction should be printed.
When the operator had a check that needed to be posted to the ledger, she (the Postronic operator was invariably a woman) would slide the ledger sheet into the machine. The machine would read the current account balance next printing row number. The operator would key the amount of the check and the Postronic would post the transaction along with the date and the new calculated balance forward.
A ‘feature’ of the Postronic was its fabric ribbon. The print ribbon fabric had both red and black ink on it. The machine would position the ribbon for printing so that the red or black was under the metal characters at the right time. If your account was overdrawn (by officer permission only) the balance would show in red. Otherwise black was used for proper balances. The ribbon was managed on two spools, in and out, feeding the long ribbon through the machine. When a spool filled, the direction reversed so that the ribbon would go back and forth forever. This went on until the ribbon’s ink was dried out.
This is where I came in. One of my jobs as a part time office boy in the bookkeeping department was to fill the ink wells in the Postronic machines. I would perform a minor mechanical chore to extract the ink wells; fill them up from red and black squeeze bottles; and then get them back into the machine so that automatic re-inking of the ribbon would carry on. This major chore would be scheduled on a dedicated Saturday about once a month. The NCR Postronic was truly state-of-the-art.
When it came time to send statements to our customers, it was my job to take the ledger sheets to the guillotine, a giant paper cutter. We could cut 100 sheets or more, down the middle, with a large handle moving a giant blade through the paper. I then took the customer half of the ledger to the paper folding machine which would move the ledger through chutes and levers until the stack was neatly folded so that the top address would show through a window envelope. I won’t suggest all of the things that could go wrong here, but Murphy’s Law was in effect.
The back side of the ledgers went back to the operators. The operators were organized so that each was responsible for a section of the alphabet. There were 40 or so operators each responsible for a sequence that might be a couple of letters like “Y” and “Z”, or just a bit of a letter like “Sa” through “Sk”. The operators sorted the statements into accumulating files.
If a customer needed a copy of a statement, it was my job to go to the sorted bins of bank statements and find what was needed. And then I would take them to the copier. The copying process in those days was a ‘wet’ job. You would place the subject statement on a negative sheet and put the pair under the lid of a light table. Next set the exposure time and hit the go button. Then take the pair out and set aside the original. Place a positive sheet of paper next to the negative sheet and insert them both into a chemical bath located under the light table. Set the timer. And at the allotted time, pull the pair through the wringer/rollers and pull them apart. Wallah, you have a copy! Let that dry out and send it out to the customer. Statements over a year old could be found on microfilm which was my job to create on duplicate rolls of film. I would search the film for an old statement and when found, press a button to create an electrostatic copy for the customer.
Back in those days, there were incredible manual checks and balances everywhere. That’s where I learned to balance to the penny. Close was not good enough, if a few million dollars of checks were posted in a day, and the total debits to all accounts came a few pennies out, no one left until the few pennies were found. No exceptions.
So brace yourself. In those days a final reckoning took place when the monthly statements were sent out. These are the ones I folded to be put in a window envelope. The checks that were posted each day during the month were sorted by account and placed in long trays behind the signature card for the account. Yes, signatures on the checks were checked at the time they were filed. When the statements were prepared to go out, the groups of checks for the account for that month were counted and were compared to the number of checks counted and printed by the Postronic. If there was a discrepancy in the count, it had to be corrected. Typically the discrepancy was a missing check that was misfiled and could be found in a nearby account in the tray. Or else!
From time to time it would happen that a check was missing. Searching for the check in all trays and at all Postronic stations and in all nooks and crannies occasionally failed to find the check. A special squad, featuring the office boy (me) and the senior managers of the department was formed.
In the bookkeeping department of First National Bank of Cincinnati, the cleaning crew had carts that held canvas trash bags. They looked pretty much like the big canvas mail bags look complete with draw strings and labels. Today there are similar bags mounted in four-wheel carts used by cleaning crews and hotel room attendants. The carts can accommodate spray bottles and rags and such. But there was one difference in bookkeeping. At the bank, the trash was tagged as to location and date, tied up with the draw strings, and filed in the basement in a wall of cubbyholes able to accommodate multiple bags per day for two months. Everything that was collected in trash for a bank floor of about 60 people, 50 women, was stored in the basement. Everything was saved from every room, nook and cranny.
The special squad was given a description of the check, the date, amount and a sample of what it looked like, and given the direction, “Go to the basement and come back when you have found the check”. This was the one time that the office boy was given the total lead. If it were today he (me) would probably be named a Project Manager.
We had a long table in the basement tall enough that we could all stand around it. The table had sides on it so that a garbage bag could be dumped on to the table and it would stay. At one end of the table was a hole in the table fashioned so that the now empty bag could be fastened under the hole. The process was to move the garbage along the table into the hole, while examining the garbage a piece at a time in search of the missing check. As you might guess, the Project Manager dealt with the challenging parts of the garbage detail for the squad.
The procedures at the bank were perfected over years. I believe the squad was formed only about a half dozen times in a year, and never before all alternatives were exhausted. I don’t recall that the squad, once called, ever failed.
This was my part time job while a freshman studying physics. All things considered, it shouldn’t surprise you to understand that I was ready when the bank offered me something a little different.
