I took a job some time ago (back around when the internet was morphing from uucp to ppp) as a consultant to an "independent agency of the United States governme

I took a job some time ago (back around when the internet was morphing from uucp to ppp) as a consultant to an "independent agency of the United States government" which seems to enjoy placing big blue boxes all over the landscape. It was my first real job outside of the university system, so it is safe to say that I was rather green. This job basically involved being an apprentice to someone who oversaw the code supplied by vendors that sorted a tremendous amount of non machine readable mail, i.e. it assisted humans using chord keyboards sorting mail with pneumatic arms and big chains and slots. Back then, a fair amount of mail traveled this way - stuff your grandmother wrote that couldn't be OCR'd, postcards, etc. The whole apparatus was similar in size to a semi trailer [1]. Each station dealt with a piece of mail every second (give or take), with two fifteen minute breaks and a half hour for lunch. This was around the time of the postal shootings [2]. Two weeks into the job, my boss quit. Just never showed up again. Not exactly sure what happened. Apparently, I had become the most knowledgeable person in the organization on this software which was currently being rolled out widely. Unsurprisingly, there were some serious code quality issues. This was QNX real time sorta unix in C and ASM with RTOS daughter boards. The vendor's code jockeys, apparently, had become unavailable. Main takeaways: Systems seem to keep working despite everything looking very fragile. Read tons of code. If it's working, don't poke it. A year later I was able to make some form of industrial dance music by coordinating the openings and closings of the mail slots and the chain with the software. Bad situations can sometimes lead to greater clarity and new opportunities. [1] http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/images/photogallery/equipmentpix/APPP136_fuji280cropped.jpg http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/images/photogallery/equipm... [2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Going_postal https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Going_postal