The chief accountant of the textile oour of stour asked for ALL items statements for the 1987, don't know why. The statement for bare finantials is already the most detailed report in existence, it's a complete history of all transactions for one account. In goods warehousing it's enriched with invoice numbers and dates, amounts, every acquisition and delivery is there, all the inventory corrections, nivelations, well everything. And although they are a wholesale and don't sell by the meter but by the bolt, there's still a lot of stuff, including those galanterija and pozamanterija, whatever the origin and meaning of these words, i.e. various buttons, zippers, ribbons, buckles and whatnot.
A statement is looked into only when some item's total is suspect, so one sherlocks to see how was the total arrived at, and if there's some suspect number on it, the original paper from which it was retyped is pulled out from the archive to see who, when and how wrote it. So it could be a dozen of those a year, mostly to spot check then to find any knowledge in them. More than that doesn't make sense, nobody will find any wisdom in staring at endless columns of digits, that's reserved for nutcases and inspectors.
And this guy asked for ALL of them. Possible causes could be that he found something funny in annual total reports, and the dežurni suspects blamed it on erc, who knows whether those guys have the complete data at all. Or was it that since they got the old pdp this summer, when we got the Vaha, and the transition seemed murky to them, who knows whether we transferred everything regularly, or it could be that they thought we fucked up something then, or that, now that they have their own machine, we don't get enough done for them, neglect them, and yet they're paying their contribution just like every other member. Or he was simply flexing his selfmanagement authority muscles, asking just to see whether we'll do it, probably fully ready to badmouth us if we didn't.
He didn't know what he was asking for, nor how much of it will there be. By our guesstimate this was supposed to be six boxes of paper, perhaps eight because of page breaks - some carpet may have three transactions in a year yet takes a hole page, some curtains a page and a half, and no bets were taken on underwear.
So they brought all of their data, all the transactions of 1987, and... ouch, these were the dailies, should be coalesced into one, then sorted by item code and date. The sorting makes temporary tables which occupy between three and five times the size of the incoming file. We didn't have as much space on the Vaha, it couldn't possibly fit any of its three 340 megabyte disks. So we arranged with our friends from the bank, knowing that they mostly scratch their balls and do nothing, and that their Vaha is mostly in experimental development stage, still not in production, so they should have lots of disk space. I put everything on a tape, walked across to vodotoranj, they had the sixth floor I guess, waited for some processing to be finished, gave the tape to some operator girl to thread it into the unit, got a terminal, ran the sort, write the result back to that tape. Verified the tape, erased what I scribbled on their disk, back to the lair. Made room just enough for this sorted table and the print files (of course we printed into files and never straight to the printer, the printer should be waited for, it's the operator girls whose job it was to keep track of what's what in there, they had their pencils and notebooks for that).
We stayed that evening until late, waiting for the printout to finish, but nope. After midnight we shut down the system, got the famous "Nakonec, bila je že krajnja ura. Zdaj že ni kava ne pomaga." (Finally, it was really about time. Now even coffee doesn't help anymore.), continued the next day. I don't remember how we continued, how we printed it partially, did the print command have an option fror page range or did I make a version of the report which would do fifty items at a time, who'll know that nowadays.
We printed perhaps one quarter of it, which was a meter and a quarter tall stack of A3 paper, just quit after the third box. The comrade idiot just kept calling to hear whether it was finished, and we told him it's a process but he can send staff to take the finished part to him. And the staff didn't even bother to take all of it, paper is heavy, more than half of it was never taken away, we sold it with other junk paper to the recyclers. The guy never even noticed whether he got it all, he probably shat himself when he saw how much of it is there. Three days later, just in case, I asked Radoja whether we should print the rest, he said „wait to hear from the guy... if not a peep from him by the end of the month, delete all that, we need disk space“.
30-XI-2024 - 20-XI-2025