INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Pilot fish gets a new assignment: responsibility for a mainframe application that prints a monthly report listing all the employees who use
the company's tuition-reimbursement program."The problem we had that made it a recurring programming problem was that, at some point,
someone had decided to send the raw data to an outside vendor, which accumulated it and created a data tape that was then sent back to us to
be used to print the monthly report," says fish."The outside vendor hired a series of temps to do the actual data entry -- all of them with
zero experience on this particular job."That means each month fish has to take the tape from the outside vendor and copy the data into a raw
"dump" format to discover just how that month's temp has decided to format the data.
