I wasn’t going to do this, but this “transmission” is inherited from Michael Bates, Bobby Holt, and Mr. Hill who runs the Dustbury blog. …

My paying gigs, in roughly chronological order:…

hehe

Got this from Charles at dustbury, and, like him, my Festivus/Christmas/Boxing Day present (to fellow bloggers, if no one else) is that I’m not tagging anyone. So, without further ado, I present jobs that I’ve held:…

The library was in transition in those days: ancient 10½-inch reels in one section, then-new IBM 3480 cartridge tapes, which looked suspiciously like 8-tracks, in another. One of my tasks was to evaluate scratch tapes for quality: tapes that no longer passed muster at 6250 cpi were retested to see if they could do the job at 1600. We didn’t have a testing facility for the cartridges: either they worked or they failed, and usually when they failed it was because the little plastic piece on the loader ripped away from the tape itself. I fixed more of these than I’d rather remember. The cartridges had serious density — 38000 cpi — but throughput was never all that impressive.

Tape Librarian sound intriguing, too. Was it in strategically placed Intelligence Headquarters, deep in OK wilderness?

The Destroyer job was temporary, but amusing: old cable boxes removed from service were to be rendered unusable, lest someone figure out how to get them back into service without paying. We took them to a local auto-salvage joint, and as old rusting hulks of cars were sent to the shredder, we filled up their seats with cable boxes.

“Destroyer of used equipment”…sounds dreamy.