I've told this story before, but why not tell it again, because it is good.

In the later Seventies, I had a reputation as a hotshot IBM Sys 3 RPG programmer. Business across the S.F. Bay Area was booming for me, but Interocean Steamship offered me my going rate of $65 an hour to create a system for them, and I said Yes.

I became an integral part of their organization as we built the new system from the ground up. There were more than a hundred users in house driving my code in live time, as we communicated with Long Beach, CA and Seattle, Wa, in real time.

This was before any American knew what a Modem was.

Long story short, I created a new version for them, as the IBM PC was sliding in. It was great code, to run on their IBM Sys 38. Took me two years.

And then the chick who took over as DP manager from me, lost all of the code in a data center accident. They had nothing, dead in the water...

When I heard about it, I was training two very lovely ladies how to write code in this business.

One was a beautiful blond, that we banged occasionally, and the other I don't remember.

But we walked into that broken major business in the early shipping business, on a Christmas Eve.

The ladies kicked into gear and told them they needed to hire every code transcriber they can find, on Christmas Eve, to re-create the foot tall pile of printed source code, that I wasn't supposed to have, btw..

It happened, the company recovered, and the cute blond that I had hit on while there, kissed me good on my last visit.