Adventures in Data Processing

“I only accept list requests on Mondays,” he said.

“But see, we need the list by this Friday, or we’ll miss the mailing.”

“You should have asked me last Monday.”

Despite the latest round of layoffs by the dot-coms, the market for employees with DP experience still is tight—which means some pretty odd ducks are showing up when catalogers advertise for system administrators. In the true example noted above, the cataloger had employed for many years a wonderful system administrator who had fine-tuned the company’s system to something approaching perfection. And then she left ... and the perfect cataloging system suddenly looked like a nest of undocumented confusion.