WYSIWYG

What You See Is What You Get. This is a journal blog, an explore-blog, a bit of this and that blog. Sharing where the mood takes me. Perhaps it will take you too.

Menory Lane; She'll Be Apples

The initial two years of settling in the Wide Brown Land, then, left much to be desired when measured against - oh let's say - Utopia. Thankfully, mine is more the pragmatic turn of mind. Utopian I am not. Sure I can drift to some pretty strange places.  Not Utopia though.

I was only once ever again to give away my heart - and never to the same extent, which is just as well for sure enough...

So enough of all that.  NCR was a great place to work.  It was a long commute for me (two hours each way at the beginning and not much less when I moved), but I really enjoyed the work.  It was with the spare parts of the automated teller machines department.  I was helping to codify the 87 gazillion parts and assist in building a computerised logistics program. Turned out I had a head for materials management.  What is more, my phenomenal memory for numbers meant that when an engineer rang up wanting the interconnectie underpluggy overdangle spring for the keypad #8, I could pull up the code of the bin in which it could be found.  From my very own internal, original and best, "CPU"!  Now they wanted me to transfer that to 1100000110101000...** 

I was one woman in a sea of men and I held my own.

Trouble was, NCR couldn't hold its own in a quickly changing market. Along came IBM and Siemens with their newer, shinier, slicker ATMs.  Eight months in, the department was 'reorganised' and it was a case of that old computing fact; LIFO (last in first out).

The company ended up specialising in point of sale and the new scanning technologies and is doing pretty well - but my timing was off.

**that's the number of parts in total for the standard machine in use at that time. ...what? Can't translate?  Okay = 49576!

Let me also take time to shout out to my Indian connections ...



5 comments:

  1. SOME changes are GOOD and OTHERS are NOT. We always feel so sorry for employees when a company (esp. a GOOD ONE) just can not keep Up with the Changes needed.

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  2. You are a survivor! I very much enjoy reading about your journey!
    (ツ) from Cottage Country Ontario , ON, Canada!

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  3. The changes were coming fast and furious back then, technology was changing so fast many companies had trouble keeping up. Too bad your job ended but at least you had fun while it lasted.

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  4. A two hour commute? Wow, too many hours of precious life. (Mom quit her job when her office moved and she ended up with a long commute.)

    Your Pals,

    Murphy & Stanley

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