I wasn’t fired or let go, I quit the job for a better position. In a way I was forced out. I was working for an actuarial company that created and managed pension plans and was running their billing system and managing their computers, this was in the mid ‘80s. They wanted to turn me back in to a word processing operator. No thanks! A friend working for a state gov’t agency had an opening in his IT department, slipped his boss my resume, I interviewed and was offered a position, and moved on down the line.

One database that I created was for printing 1099 tax forms. When you get a disbursement from your retirement plan before you’re of retirement age, it’s taxable, and you’ll get a 1099 at the end of the year with a copy sent to the IRS. Well, we were the people who printed those forms if your plan was managed by us. The system was simple to use: the actuaries were given the information on the disbursements, and at the end of the year I would plug that info into a database, load up that tax year’s 1099s, and crank out the forms.

Keep in mind this was no later than 1988. We’re talking dot matrix printers, specifically Okidatas. Marvelous printer! You can still see them chugging away at lots of tire stores and places like that where you need multi-part forms. Here’s the thing: printing forms is HARD. On a laser printer, it’s easy because you’re not moving a form up and down to fill in a box precisely. But on a dot matrix printer, you’re dealing with something called micro-spacing, moving the form up and down in very tiny increments.

Let me tell you: writing the code to print those forms in dBase III was a major pain! It took a lot of work, but when I was done, that code worked perfectly. I documented that code extensively. And within the code, I had a comment that read “DO NOT TOUCH THE FOLLOWING CODE. It does microspacing, and if you mess it up, the 1099s will not print properly!”

You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?

But you need a little more story first.

My boss, let’s call her M, was a competent woman. She knew enough about computers to know she knew nothing and let me get on with it. And everything kept working without interruption. Then, for some reason, her husband started working for the company.

And he was a “professional programmer.” He worked for one of the big name companies that made mainframes. Not IBM, one of the other ones. He was an expert!

Except he didn’t really know micros. He certainly didn’t know dBase III, which was perhaps the biggest microcomputer database system at the time.

He was one of the reasons I left.

Now, I was in my mid 20s, and I admit I was wet behind the ears, this was my first real programming job. I was extremely good with database, I had a great natural talent for it that only grew with the years and increased experience. And as I said before, some time later I left the company when they wanted to move me back into being a typist. I wanted to grow in IT and programming, I had to move on.

So I left. As it happens, there was a woman in the company who wanted to date me, so we dated and had a great time for a while, lovely woman. And she told me about M’s husband.

He touched the code, specifically the code that did the microspacing. And he broke the code.

And the 1099 program never worked again.

I don’t know why they didn’t contact me, I could have gotten it working again and probably made it more idiot-proof. At a guess the husband might have been embarrassed that a mere whelp of a programmer could write something that he couldn’t figure out and make work. I have no idea what they did for 1099s after that: typed them one at a time?

I don’t know, and an instrument has yet to be invented that could measure how much I care about it.