The Blue Goose

When I was in college I did several co-ops with companies.   The company I worked for the longest, and subsequently was hired by, was IBM.  I was working towards a degree in software development, or as it was called back then, "programming" because there weren't all the specialties there are now in the field.  Once I started working for IBM I kept on working for them in sort of a continual co-op situation until I was hired upon graduation.

I worked in a large software development lab that had around seven hundred employees working on all sorts of products from IBM.  Most of the work was for mainframe-based products and while we had IBM PCs at our desks, we'd spend a lot of time in green screen terminal windows doing much of our work.   I was fortunate in that I was hired to work on a product being developed for the desktop so I got to work in the newest, latest object-oriented technology and had a more powerful machine than I could have afforded on my own.

This still was back in the day where a lot of things were printed out.   Much of what some of the programmers printed out would come on that paper with the holes on the sides in long, long sheets that folded back and forth.   Some of the developers would have their code printed out to review or would have "dumps" of the error conditions they were trying to debug.   I was lucky again that the product I was developing in, called Smalltalk, was all on my machine and I didn't need to print out anything because the debugging tools were right there on the desktop.

There were people down the hall from me that had stacks of continuous form paper all over their office.  One man I remember had a claustrophobic office from the sheer volume of paper stacked on every surface available.

IBM was particular about confidentiality.   Things were, "IBM Confidential" meaning you couldn't talk about it.   IBM was almost cold war-like in their concerns about information escaping from the confines of the development lab.   For the life of me, I couldn't understand why ninety percent of what we did would be of interest to their competitors, but I was just a co-op and it wasn't my place to decide.

On every floor in an area just off the corridor from the elevators was a large blue container.   This thing was big.   It blocked most of the hallway in width, was about as tall as I was and was probably ten feet deep.   This monstrosity was called "The Blue Goose".  The blue part I got, the goose part I never did.   At the front of it was a two-inch slit at the top into which you would put anything IBM Confidential or higher.   There were more restrictive classifications of confidential, fortunately, I never had to deal with any myself.

The Blue Goose would be taken away every so often to have the materials shredded and possibly, but not necessarily recycled.  This was back in 1990 and recycling wasn't much of a thing at the time.  Provided your paperwork wasn't confidential, you could just put it in your trash can.   BUT...if you weren't sure, and perhaps you had written something like, "I should remember to work on the subroutine for the login page" it was probably confidential.   Such was the advice of my team leader.  He was on the excessively cautious side.

I left that lab in 1994, shortly before it was relocated to the large IBM site in the next city.  This was during the IBM hiring freeze and multiple rounds of "incentive-based reductions" in which people retired early not necessarily of their own choosing, among other reductions in force.   It wasn't the best of economic times for IBM.

I left of my own volition to go work for another company that did consulting work with the same product I had been using to write code for the past several years and for the remainder of my career in software development I worked in and around the IBM products I had initially started working in back in 1990.   IBM was a nice place to work, but it was much nicer working for a consulting company in many ways.

That was the last time though that I ever worked in a large office.   It was nice being in a building with other people all around you.   For the most part after that, I had a home office.   It was a different work experience and one I grew used to, but I have always missed the camaraderie of working with people around me all day.

What My Son Did Today:  My son came in after school with his iPad and asked if I would approve a download of a free game.   He said we could play it together.   I got it downloaded but he ran off.  He reminded me after dinner to download it and then got distracted watching something on television.   I'm going to try and get his attention after writing this post and see if he wants to play together.   He's off for the next five days for Thanksgiving break, hopefully, we can play some together.

What My Daughter Did Today:  My daughter came in from school and wanted to play for me a song she had written on the piano.   She wanted to show it to me before her music therapist got here.   I went to the basement and listened to her piece (her second composition she told me) and then heard the doorbell.   Chelsea arrived with her baby, Ella, who my children adore (because they love all babies unconditionally).   Ella went to the basement with Chelsea to listen to my daughter's piece and have music lesson with her.