Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Changing a bad habit on your own is tough. Lots of rehab programs use the concept of an “accountability partner.” You are in it together with someone else and you confide in each other about how it’s going. Whether you do it in person or just tweet it every day online, simply knowing that you have to check in with somebody else can be a big motivation.

Tyla and I have both been trying unsuccessfully to shed a few pounds so I geeked it up and used the accountability concept. Our digital scale logs our weight every morning. I grab that data and put it in my own database. Then I made a very quick little website that shows how much combined weight we have lost since the date we agreed to do this. It intentionally does not show how much each person has contributed. We set a shared goal and now we’re both working toward it.

We’ll see how well this works in the long run, but so far it’s adding some fun to the boring task of watching what we eat.

If you read through the Bureau of Labor and Satistics list of dangerous jobs, you’ll learn that being a truck driver or working on a farm are two of the most dangerous jobs you can have. They run roughly a 0.01% risk of dying on the job.

These lists all miss the most dangerous job in America. It’s a job that we watch people compete heavily for. People want the job so badly that they’ll spend millions of dollars trying to get it. Some people ruin their lives and their reputations to get the job. Of course I’m talking about the presidency. Eight of our 44 presidents have died in office which means you have an 18% chance of dying in office! Half of those were natural causes but still, a 9% chance of death when taking a job would probably deter me from it.

Thankfully we haven’t had one for 50 years and that’s probably due to a much stronger Secret Service, but there are still plenty of attempts.

The other day at work we were talking about our biggest mistakes in a work environment. It reminded me of an epic failure at my first computer job…

My Dad was a contracter and his boss (the owner) got me a job during high school at a company that processes payroll for thousands of companies across the United States. I worked in the computer room processing the jobs. We had big laser printers that would print 150 checks per minute and it kept you pretty busy just feeding it paper, not to mention pulling 12 sheets out of it whenever it jammed or pouring a gallon of toner into it. it took a while to get the hang of it, but after a while it was fairly mechanical. I enjoyed the job though because the people were fun and sometimes I’d flip through the checks and hold one worth a million dollars. If I had changed my name to “Illinois Department of Revenue”, do you think I could have cashed it?

When I started learning the old mainframe system that ran the whole operation, I specifically remember hearing them say “Don’t worry, you can’t really screw anything up.” Challenge accepted.

The computer system had a bunch of “partitions” and each one could run an individual payroll job. One of our main tasks was to look at all the incoming requests and figure out how to organize them to get maximum throughput through the system. If I remember correctly, there was a background partition and then eight job partitions. The background partition was how you interacted with the system and submitted jobs to the either other partitions. When things went wrong with a job, you’d pause a partition by typing “P F3” where 3 is the number of the partition running the job.

On some very busy days, we’d squeeze a little more juice out of the system by running jobs in the background partition. It was a little risky because it would block user interactions while it was running, but if you had a really quick, high priority job to get through, it wasn’t a huge deal.

It was one of those busy days and I had submitted a job to the background partition. There was a mistake so to stop it from getting worse, I quickly typed “P BG”. Those characters will always be burned into my brain because basically it felt like when I hit Enter, the entire building ground to a halt. I had just paused the partition that the computer was using to listen to input from the users. So effectively the computer was happily chugging along with it’s ears plugged and there was no way to tell it to start listening again because it wasn’t listening to us.

Oops.

We all just kind of stared at each other with this “uh oh” look on our faces. People around the building started coming to the window of the computer room with quizzical looks on their faces. The president and the mainframe guru came storming in. I made myself tiny in the corner. It was a doozy of a problem. They were on the phone with IBM for THREE HOURS trying to figure out how to fix it. I still don’t know what they did but eventually it came back online and somehow I got a pass because I was the stupid intern.

So please, don’t tell me that I can’t do anything bad that you haven’t done before. I have a knack for it. Maybe that’s why I ended up geting a job as a tester for 8 years.

It’s only the beginning of February but we’re already starting to get some warmer days. The lawn is waking up, plants are starting to grow, and people are starting to catch spring fever. I’m loving the increasing daylight hours. This time of year is usually very cloudy so on those clear mornings I’m shocked at how early it gets bright. “Spring” lasts a very long time in the Pacific Northwest. It’s roughly now until June and then summer arrives with a bang around the Fourth of July. I’m looking forward to those long summer evenings where we can go out for walks after dinner before Elijah’s bedtime. I’m also hoping to make good use of the warm summer weather on some hikes with Elijah. I’ve already tried to get him out a couple times but the weather and our schedule haven’t aligned. There are so many fun things to see in the mountains and I’m hopeful that he’ll like hiking with me.

There’s no real point here, other than me looking forward to spring and spending time outside with my family. Bring on the sunshine!