Ralph Brandt. Common Sense in York, PA - Caterpillar

Cat was a good company to work for and there were a lot of good people there. When I retired in October of 1996 the section I supervised had 11 people, most were over 50 years old and most had over 25 years with CAT. Many of us had been together for most of our time with CAT. I'll poke some good natured fun, but it is all that, just fun... New items will be added at the top, if you come back to visit you can quit reading when they look familiar. These stories are the way I saw them, or maybe as Gino would say, how they should have happened. I am not sure that they are necessarily one hundred percent historically accurate. Send me a note if you recognize any of these people. I assure you they all worked for CAT at one time.

We had this golfer who refused to pay the high cost of green fees at one prestigeous course. His reason? He could make a fool of himself on a much cheaper course. Plant 1995

Who hung the black girdle on the bulletin board in the parts department one morning? More important, who got uncomfortable enough in it to take it off and drop it in the walkway? Parts Dept late 1960's

Three of us went to the loft together to look for some equipment, the guy with the key went to the one end of the loft for something. The other two finished their scavenging and returned to the gate to find it securely locked. The guy with the key was GONE and had locked the chain on the gate! There were few people around, and no one would likely hear them. After some time they realized they could slip out through a small passage and did so. The guy with the key was sitting at his desk. 10/6/96

The best view or Peoria? The one you see in the rear view mirror of a car headed out...

Peoria? If you run it through most spell checkers it comes out Pyhareha, a disease of the gums. Most would call it appropriate.

The best vacation offered by a Peoria travel agancy. A one way trip anywhere.

We had this young woman as a new programmer that seemed to always have a very large and obvious run in her nylons at the same place. This went on for weeks, we kept thinking she was wearing the same hose. Finally one day she asked one of the guys if there was some way she could smooth off an sharp edge on her desk. We helped her. Did we feel bad.

We had this guy who was three coining for coffee, with four people in the game he came out with the first call, "zero." Three guys looked at each other. None of the four had any coins.

You haven't done it until you have cooked chicken in a 2 5/8" 8 spindle ACME Gridley screw machine with a bar feeder. (I'll bet you wonder how a data processor did that.)

We had another guy that called seven (in three coins) with three people in the game and no coins in his own hand.

We had this guy who was holding a cup of coffee in his left hand when someone asked, "What time is it." He turned his hand toward himself and dumped the coffee in his lap.

Like every company we went through fads, the Juran fad, the JIT fad, the Team Building fad. During the team building fad the mechanics of building teams became more important than teamwork.

We were learning JIT, Just In Time, we called it DNL. Darn Near Late. Unfortunately the DN often gets lost.

One manager I asked for some clerical help told me, "You have a secretary in your group, have her do it." The "secretary" was a very talented and valuable female computer programmer with about 7 years of experience. The only good things I can say about this are, "he isn't a manager now," and that was in the mid-seventies.

When we got our first female programmer there was a two day discussion of the managers to determine whether she should get a steno chair, like the other women or a chair with arms like the other programmers. (That happened in June of 1966)

You can tell a man from Caterpillar, but you can't tell him much.

Education is a partnership between the student and the teacher, if either fails to put in his part, nothing happens.

Computers have their rated speed, people can be pushed to work faster.

Computers can be like people, they are a lot more friendly when you get to know them.

One of my co-workers came up with this, when we got our first female department head at York. I can't take credit for it. "Promoting a competent woman to a high level position isn't anything. We will not have equality until we promote an incompetent woman to a high level position, we've done that with incompetent men."

Another of my co-workers says, "The woman who aspires to be as good as a man, lacks ambition."

Third shift can be brutal, I spent some time there before CAT decided they couldn't make a computer operator out of me in 1965 and promoted me to programming. Don't let that worry you, there are others who have been promoted because they couldn't cut it, why shouldn't I benefit too. When I left third shift work was temporarily slow, we sometimes were reading manuals for 3-4 hours a night. My major job during that time was keeping the others awake. I'd read a page, wake up D and J. Read another page, ditto. When I left I warned them the boss was going to catch them sleeping. He did the first night.

We had a couple of third shift operators that liked to put new programmers assigned to operations in the trash can. It was sort of an initiation or right of passage. One night they tried with this scrawny new guy and the three of them couldn't get him in. The practice died.

We had a supervisor that was a neat freak. He passed out the paychecks to his people one week and later found an envelope on the floor. The next week he placed a small number on the back corner of each envelope by pulling the seal loose, writing the number on it and resealing it. He hoped to find the culprit. That night he found all but one of the envelopes on the floor and each of them had the corner removed, the one which would have given him the number. (Shows how a Manager can make something worse if he tries hard enough.)

I was writing a channel appendage routine (in IBM DOS/VS) for a printer and needed some information. I called the IBM rep and told him I needed to know which return point to use. His answer gave less than a warm and fuzzy feeling, "There's more than one?" And I was looking to him for help. I went back and read the assembler code to find the answer.

There was this third shift computer operator that called me about 3 in the morning, the IBM 3272 control unit was hung up again. I told him to hit it on the top and he felt this was not wise. I then directed him to drop a box of IBM cards on it. He hollered to the other operator, "Bring me a box of 5081's." (This was a stock card type.) The response from the other operator was, "Manila's or red tops?" None of us could determine what difference the color would make.

We had one programmer that would have a test fail for a program error and send it back for a second run to see if the computer would make the same mistake twice.

Then there was the 1401 programmer that would always have several versions of a program on his desk. He called them the bad good deck, the good bad deck and the bad bad deck. The bad good deck worked but it didn't do everything right, the good bad deck didn't work but if it did it would have done everything right, and the bad bad deck, you can guess that. We finally moved him to operations...

There was this computer guru who dumped a datacell. He literally turned it upside down and the strips fell out on the floor.. (The datacell was a 3x5x5 foot unit that had an average access time of about 250 milliseconds and stored 400 Meg of data on removable magnetic mylar strips. The ten holders (called cells) each held 200 strips - 40 MEG and could be individually removed. It was the cause of many hours of lost sleep. It was probably the most complex mechanical device IBM has ever built. I hope they learned their lesson..)

We had this IBM tech we called bear. After one night working on the datacell and loosing sleep and all of his religion because it would fail every time he left, he pushed two desks together and slept on them. When we came in the next morning, there he was, a large mound on two desks.... I guess it was funnier to see.

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(c) Ralph Brandt, 1996 Write me at [email protected]

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Revised 1/29/1999 DRAAW is not a misspelling, it is an acronym for Dee, Ralph, Angela, Annette and William.

Common Sense in York PA, Copyright 1995, 6,7,8,9,2000, 2001 Ralph E. Brandt, York PA