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Sysadmin's sole client was his wife – and she queried his bill

Marshalltown

Ah yes. My first job - actually related to computers as anything but tools - I was sitting at my desk trying to kludge together some dbaseIV code to parse a very large (for a desktop PC) data file into a saner order. My new employers calls me to his office where his computer "is slow." He is writing a report in WordPerfect about 12 pages worth so far. He is formatting the document as he writes and then edits, rewrites, redits reformats and on and on. He wanders off to get coffee or visit bar or something. I close the file and wait a very long time. Once the file is closed everything seems jake. Nothing slow, programs come up quickly (for the early 1990s). There's no internet in the office yet and the world wide web is merely a rumour as far as we are concerned. So I loaded his document and it was really, really slow. Hmmm. I gave the WP reveal codes command - WOW! The text is literally lost in orphan formatting code. So I closed it again and checked the file size, which for DOS, was huge. I don't recall the actual size. So I went in cleared loads of orphan codes away and cleared them away and cleared them away. Then I saved and reloaded the file. It was fine. Closed WP and went back to my own work. I here the boss enter his office and settled there's a brief quiet period and then a girlish shriek and my name screamed. So trotting in, I see he's paper white. He had noticed the difference in file size. It considerable convincing. Even looking at and printing the whole file could not initially convince him loads of important stuff hadn't simply vanished.

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