My Unusual Job - Bleeding-Edge Software Designer

Cutting-edge technology refers to current and fully developed technology features, unlike bleeding-edge technology, which is so new that it poses unreliability risks to users.
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I first became involved with computers in the early 80s. Most of the technologies I worked with or developed over the years would be considered bleeding-edge technologies. One of my first projects was to write software to handle rentals in a video store in 1983. This was two years before Blockbuster Video became a thing.

During the 80s, my mother became the Chief Returning Officer for the local riding in the elections. At the time, election officials would go house to house, collecting the names of all the potential voters before each election. They would return the names and addresses to be typed on stickers for cards that were mailed to each household to be presented at each person's poll, and lists with the peoples' information were typed out to be cross-referenced on election day. It used to take a couple of weeks for a crew of people to type the 70-100,000 names and addresses on typewriters. I set up a database that the local names could be typed into once, and printing wasn't a problem. After our riding had been completed on time, we received an emergency call from Election Headquarters. The adjoining riding had fallen through. The deadline was quickly approaching, and none of their typing had been completed. I imported some data into my database, and all my typists needed to type in the person's name and three digits of their postal code. The database filled in the rest of the address information. It took my six typists two days to type in 70,000 names and addresses. All the printouts were done before the deadline.

That wasn't the only time that I was called on to bail people out. During the mid-nineties, our provincial government required greater oversight of our education system. One of the requirements was that each School Board had to inventory all the schools in their jurisdiction. It isn't as simple as it sounds. Each flooring had to be identified. Was it carpet, or was it terrazzo? What type of wiring and light fixtures; what sort of conduit heating etc. It needed to be evaluated for age and quality. Some of the schools had been in operation for over 100 years, and the provincial government needed to establish budgets for replacement. While an arduous task, it was "easily" accomplished with sufficient drive and manpower.

Our school board hired two engineering firms to conduct an inventory of the schools. Two weeks before the end of the year, we received a telephone call. One firm had measured using the Imperial system while the other had used the Metric system. A slight inconvenience, you might think, which is true; it just needs a conversion. Except!!! Both firms had posted their data into the spreadsheets wrong.

I suspect anyone reading this knows how to use a spreadsheet. You have rows and columns. Neither firm had posted the data quickly into rows and columns. They would start the inventory of a room in one section of the spreadsheet and the inventory of a different room on the same sheet - in a different area. It was a major mess when you consider that there were around 100 schools in our district and easily 100 rooms in each (including closets and walkways). Back in those days, we had tiny programs that allowed you to write the repetitive steps into a keyboard shortcut called a "Macro." They still exist, but most people don't need to worry about them. So essentially, I programmed the macro to copy and paste the data into a new spreadsheet with the proper layout. We had all the data cleaned up before the start of the new year. We had a web interface designed to pull off the data within another two weeks, so our school board went well beyond the requirements before the end of January deadline. They continued to use the web interface to maintain their school inventory for twenty years with virtually zero change. The only changes they needed over the years were additional reports. Ironically some school boards didn't have a system in place for a further two years.

Frequently our city was the tail that was shaking the dog. We had local outlets of companies or government agencies to develop something that was adopted or prompted changes. For example, our local social service agency needed to have a program to maintain records for the people they serve. We devised a program that anticipated what the province would do in the future. For instance, our program could do it if they wanted to increase the benefits by a percentage or a set amount.
While we had a program up and running, and it only cost the local agency $twenty-thousand to roll out, the province had designed a system that cost one $million that didn't work. Given you had a program that did work for $20,000 compared to a program that cost $1,000,000 and didn't work, what would you do as a responsible politician? They threw out both systems and went with the $80,000,000 option. Remember the trivial feature that we had that would increase all the benefits by a set amount or percent? That wasn't an option in the third program, but they solved it by hiring typists at $80.00 per hour to make the changes manually.

And that was just one of my unusual jobs.

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