I was sitting around the house today, telling Daniel about a life event that occurred back in the late seventies. I had just wrapped up a huge contract with Interocean Steamship in San Francisco. Actually it was my second with them, I wrote the code that ran their business, on IBM Sys 3 Models Ten and then the Fifteen.

They were a big shipping company with offices in Seattle and Long Beach and the system I created for them allowed their 150 employees to enter shipping data and have it communicated in real-time to the remote locations. Waaay before the Internet! They bought a one gigabyte drive from IBM that cost $50,000, was bigger than my living room chair, and we thought we were in data heaven.

I turned the whole thing over to a lady they had hired to be their Data Processing Manager. I then moved on to my next project, training two beautiful smart women, how to do what I do.

The three of us were at the IBM Data Center when I got the call from their DP manager. She was in tears, sobbing hysterically over the phone, said she fucked up and lost the code. Everything, gone. System down. Company paralyzed!

Well, thank god I had violated our agreement, and had printed out every line of code into a six inch high stack of computer paper, one late night, and took it home on the Bart Train.

The ladies and I retrieved that printout and showed up at their Christmas party, on the tenth floor of the California building in downtown San Francisco. It was like walking into a funeral! Their business was about to go under, and 150 jobs lost.

We told them that they needed to bring in as many people as possible, right now, to transcribe the printed code. Over Christmas, pay whatever they want, just get it done.

A year later I walked in on them. They were thriving, and grateful. There was this one little blond girl that I always used to hit on, to no avail. She walked up to me and kissed me on the mouth. Payment accepted.