During the early 1950s I worked for a large manufacturing company – I believe there were over 4,000 employees. The company bigwigs prided themselves on being in the forefront of technology, so the decision was made to upgrade the data processing system, as it was called in those pre-IT days, to take advantage of the new equipment and methods which had been developed during wartime. After many months of planning by highly trained analysts, a new system for streamlining the order processing, shipping and billing procedures was ready to go. The changeover was scheduled to take place over a weekend. Haha. Now I am speaking about a rather large system: this company was shipping fifty freight-car-loads and over 200 truckloads of product each day. One can see that any delay would cost big bucks. For three weeks not one item of product left the plant! Those individuals responsible for installing the system were working over 100 hours per week in order to get it going! After th...
My alarm clock goes off every morning at eight, except for the few times when I have a breakfast date. Usually I wake up about an hour before that, or at least I partly wake up. It is important that I remain in a “not quite awake but not quite asleep” state, because I consider that time as the germination period for whatever seeds happen to have blown into my head.