Paul Hill wrote: > On Dec 21, 2007 6:46 PM, mrgmhale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <snipped>> > The server run an access control system in a college dorm. All Fox > for DOS based. Of course when the system was down nobody could get > into their rooms :-) >
I need to be vague on purpose here... there were so many things WRONG with what happened I can't risk this coming back to me, even with the Statute of Limitations... Years and years ago I moved to a different state and didn't land a programming job at first, so with my law enforcement background I took a job as a patrol security guard at a small private college. As I roamed the campus from time to time I'd go by the computer lab and one time overheard some dBase key words being mentioned. One time I popped in and found out the kids were in fact learning dBase. I answered the kids questions and they were a bit stunned to see a security guard knowing this stuff. To them it was the latest-great-wiz-bang stuff, to me it was old hat yawner.... It wasn't long before I was basically holding office hours there in the lab. Word got to the debt head and he thanked me for the help since he didn't have a clue what all this dBase stuff was anyway and just read from the book they were using - he had zero hands on experience with it anyways.... Then one night I get a call at home. It's from a Senior VP of Operations at a BIG corporation that builds things that go BOOM! He knew the computer dept head and said he heard of me thru this contact. They were having a meeting the following week of all the international VP's and big wigs, and it turns out all his operational reports were wrong. There was a critical bit that they weren't trapping in the manufacturing process (think log files and/or process control languages). Without this number, all his reports (that he had never bothered to read before now) were useless to the honchos about to arrive. He asks me if I wouldn't mind stopping by and taking a look. RIGHT NOW. At 9pm on a Thursday. Said he'd pay me $500 cash to just come take a look. This guy was DESPERATE. I drive there and get met at the gate and he escorts me to the main building. He shows me the reports and the machine that traps the data. It's a device that I had never seen or heard of before, but at least the job control language was sitting there on the screen and one of the operators happened to know how to get at the programming. You should have seen this VP guy - looked white as a ghost and seemed to think the world was going to end if this thing didn't start working - NOW. I didn't know this version of the JCL but it looked like a cross between BASIC and Assember, so I could grasp what was going on. The VP says he will give me another $1000 if I can fix it before Monday. I told him I'd see what I can do... After all, he already handed me $500 and even though I thought I had ZERO chance of doing anything for him, I wanted to at least make it look like I had tried... Why they didn't have one of their own people take a look I was never told, but I suspected they fired him at some point and were now embarrassed and/or stuck without him. So with a guard standing behind me watching as he held his M16, I started poking around the code. It was remarkably concise and easy to follow. I could tell from the report in front of me that it was intercepting stuff from the data stream coming from the production line, gleaning certain bits and writing those off to some log file. The report obviously used this log file to do its' thing... I could see that it was gathering this and that, and it *should* have been grabbing the other thing, but wasn't. I looked, and looked.... sure enough, there was a missing comma in the line and this last bit was at the end, so the JCL just truncated it. I had the operator guy put in a comma, save the file and restart the program. Sure enough, they now had their super-special info being written to the log file and the reports were now correct. This took me all of about 20 minutes... I walk to the guys office (with guard in tow), pop in there to tell him I'm done, and as a joke I asked him "what will you give me if I can get this done before Saturday so he could have a chance to go over the reports before the big meeting on Monday". This guy was getting more and more desperate by the minute.... He said if I could somehow get it done before morning he'd give me an extra grand. I told him I was done, he checked it out and sure enough - I pulled it off. He hugs me, goes to a safe in his office and pulls out a wad of cash and hands me $2000. I told him I was joking before about the money but he said he didn't care - having that thing fixed was worth every penny. So I made $2500 for about two hours of my time. Here's the punch line though: the guy damn near had a heart attack when he found out my involvement was just a big misunderstanding. He thought I had a Top Secret Security Clearance, when in fact I was just a Security Guard. How he and the computer dept guy got that trivial detail confused is beyond me, but I wasn't supposed to be there and a lot of people were gonna go to jail if anyone found out. The guard excorted me out of the building and back to my car and I never heard a word about it ever again. mj _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
