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Susan presented herself, visible this time, at the
office. A supervisor led her into a huge room that had
rows and rows of impossibly tiny desks set close together.
She was a small woman with hair the color of the pipes
in Sue's bathroom.
The woman spent a few minutes training Sue to type
customer information into a database. It was a simple
data entry job. On the desk sat a pile of cards that
people had mailed in. Sue had to check the information
was complete, look for any obvious spelling errors,
and then type the information onto the screen.
"I'll check back in ten minutes. Don't worry,"
said the woman. "We have daily backups. If anything
goes wrong we can do a roll back. You should be able
to handle 120 cards an hour once you get up to speed."
Sue didn't know what a roll back might be, but it sounded
reassuring. In college she used computers a lot, and
she was sure she could cope. Reasonably sure. But one
hundred and twenty cards an hour? That was one card
every 30 seconds. She looked skeptically at the pile
of cards on the desk.
Boldly she pressed the Enter key on the keyboard just
as she had been shown and began to copy the information
from the first card. The handwriting was neat and easy
to read, but the woman had warned that sometimes the
handwriting could be hard to decrypt.
Once all of the fields on the screen were filled she
moved the mouse over the OK button, took a deep breath
and clicked her right finger. "Please redo ZIP
code - error 1273" said the computer.
She looked at the ZIP code on the card. It matched
the one she had typed. She clicked the OK button again
and saw the same error message. The ZIP included the
number 7 and it occurred to her that it was written
to look a little like a 4. She changed the number on
the screen and pressed OK. "Phone area code doesn't
match ZIP - error 5554" said the computer.
Hell.
The phone number had a few 7s. One of them was in the
area code. She changed it to a 4, and then changed all
the other 7s to 4s, to be on the safe side. One of them
looked like it really should be a 7 but she changed
it anyway. Time was pressing.
She hit OK again. "Work phone number missing -
error 12" said the computer.
"Shit," said Sue. She thought for a moment
and then copied the home telephone number into the work
telephone number field.
"Work phone and home phone must be different -
error 12543678"
"You little bastard," she muttered. She moved
the cursor to the Work Phone field and changed the last
digit at random.
"Click continue," said the computer.
"About time," said Sue. She snatched another
card.
Two hours later she presented herself at the supervisor's
desk.
"About those backups that you mentioned."
She tried to look winning but she had a horrible feeling
that it didn't work.
The woman allowed herself a satisfied smiled. Somehow
she'd known that Susan was the kind who messed things
up the first night. "Which state do you need?"
"Kentucky," Sue said. She shifted, uncomfortably.
The supervisor just watched her. "And Ohio,"
Sue added.
"Give me five minutes to load the tape,"
the woman told her, flatly. She reached towards the
cupboard behind her chair, and then noticed that Sue
was waiting. "Was there anything else?"
"Well," said Sue, and hesitated. "North
Dakota." The woman reached for a pad and wrote
down the names of the three states.
"North Dakota?"
"North and South Dakota, really."
The woman had stopped smiling now and she spoke slowly.
"Honey, why don't you just give me the list?"
Sue took a deep breath. She could tell where this was
leading. "Nebraska, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine,"
she said, pausing to remember. "Florida, Texas,
California, Colorado and Alaska." She wondered
if they'd pay her for the two hours she'd worked. "Tennessee..."
She stopped again to think. "There were a couple
more mid western states. I think Idaho was one. Oh,
yes, and the Carolinas." Even Susan was surprised
at the length of the list. She didn't think she'd made
that many mistakes.
"Is that the lot?"
"You might want to check Europe."
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