I was cleaning today, well, last night, and lost in the bottom of an obscure drawer I found an old floppy disc. Yes, one of those things, 3.5HD 1.44meg floppy from back in the good old days. The label was bare, the contents a mystery. Since I'm in possession of one of probably twenty working 3.5 drives in town I crossed my fingers (that the dust bunnies hadn't converted the inside of the drive into time share condos), stuck it in, and lo! Everything spun up like it should, the disc read perfectly. To most folks what I found would have been a total case of WTF? of course, as it was for me for the first few moments.
The contents were rather cryptic. Four text files, named in a code of some sort. I wasn't sure what I was looking at, not right at first. I glanced into the files, and found a DOS command line, next a long string in the all but forgotten command line language of VAX/VMS followed by long columns of numbers in text and tab format. The memory returned, a bit slowly, the facts have been in the deep archives for fifteen years. Those four files document one of my greatest triumphs, and betrayals.
You see, those files date from 1997, back when I did useful work for a living. They were batch data captured from our process computer, and not just any batches. Those four out of the many thousands were the ones where I did what I'd been told could not be done. I did it, square into the teeth of months worth of the educated peoples condescending mockery I did it, and I totally saved their ass for them. Seriously. I won't bore you with the technical details, should anyone want to challenge I'll provide them, but I won't bore you with them now.
Net result was probably two hundred men had good paying jobs for another decade at least, maybe longer I don't know. Net result was the company I was working for was able to retain contracts totalling well over 20 million dollars a year and do it using a very common raw material that sold for 87 cents a pound (back in the day) instead of a very rare material that sold for over three dollars a pound.
When all this went down the one and only company that sold the rare material needed for that line of products had just told my company to go fuck off, we didn't buy enough of the stuff for them to set up a dedicated production line, they couldn't meet our quality specs running batch scale, and they were tired of us bitching at them. They gave no warning, no grace period, they just said fuck off, and did it with the ink barely dry on one of the quarterly contracts worth 5 million a pop, the bread and butter backbone of our operation. We'd used the cheaper material in other applications, but it was commonly agreed it couldn't be made to meet the quality specs demanded for the mainstay. They were totally fucked, without those contracts everything folded up and blew away, and if they were fucked so were we.
Breaking half of the rules I helped write I sat down and cooked off those four batches (a polymer suspension reaction delicate as deflowering a virgin without hurting her) using a run profile I'd been prohibited from even trying for almost a year. It worked, the QC folk called back two days later litterally dancing for joy: it would work, it could go into service to replace the stuff we couldn't get anymore.
I saved their cumulative ass for them. And you know what I got by way of gratitude? A twenty five dollar thank you dinner from the guys who worked down stream of me. It was what they had to offer, they knew I was trying for all of us. The company never said a fucking word, not one.
Fourteen years after the event I looked at those long columns of dry numbers, and it all came back to me. The anger, the bitterness, the betrayal. I'm not alone, there's been a lot of us treated that way, I know of two or three other cases just within my sphere of folks.
And the sorry father fuckers wonder why they have protestors on wall street, why the folks who actually keep the world running are ready to take the college brats and management assholes and stake 'em out over an anthill and piss on them before getting around to drizzling out the honey to attract the ants. My resolve is solid, then and now: fuck 'em. I know how to do things they'd masturbate live on the six o'clock news to get their hands on, and I'll be hung and be damned before I'll show them how. They fucked me over one time to often.
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