I worked at First Wisconsin National Bank (now USBank) for 16 years. Most of it in some form of technology role. It was not my goal to work in an office, especially not for that long. I had always wanted to be a teacher and had planned to go back to college after working for a year, but as is always the case I life had other plans for me.
I was very lucky to have landed a job at the bank. It was the early 80's and life was about to get bumpy as the US went through a recession. Due to my typing speed (easily 100 words per minute at this point) and the need for many, many letters to applicants I never had a worry about being let go.
I graduated from electric typewriter to full blown word processing equipment. The ease I had for learning the different pieces of equipment led to a promotion to the electronic data processing (EDP) department. I was assigned to the Teller Systems team. It was this team that saw me as more than just secretarial support, they gave me the opportunity to work on the code that would run the machines. It happened quite by accident.
The filed programs needed to have change logs written in the front of the binder so that if something went wrong you would know who made the changes and what should be reversed.
While I was updating the change logs I would always check the code to make sure the change log made sense by looking at the code and verifying the information in the log. I had no idea that the code generally is not natively understood. My boss saw that I was able to read the code and recognize patterns and immediately began using me as a junior programmer, although I didn't receive any extra pay, it was fun to be considered a member of the team.
The teller systems office was in the basement of the building. Go figure, I worked in a building comprised of 40 floors of windows, and I was stuck in the basement!
Steve was the head of the team. He lived in Sheboygan and when he wasn't at work, he tended to the pigs on his farm. Kim (male, not female) had just recently welcomed a daughter to his family. Jim and his wife both worked at the bank in the same department, but she was on a different team. Mark was the youngest, just recently graduating from college, and Augie, the senior member of the team. Looking back they all seemed so much older than me, when in reality they were probably all in their 30's. I used to tease them about being ancient. Sorry guys!
So, there I was. The only female on a team of six, working in a room in the basement. I was totally protected.
They all took me under their wing and showed me how to program each different type of equipment. We were each assigned a specialty area, mine was the NCR 279. Only a handful of correspondent banks (banks we didn't own, but provided computer support) used this equipment, but I was the only one that knew how to program it. It's program was stored on a cassette tape and you coded it by recording the
pattern using a 10 key-pad. Eventually I graduated to the higher end equipment. I learned about the special (token-ring) wiring, and how the programs traveled from mainframe to each teller workstation.
The basement had a mock up teller workstation so we could test the changes we made before recording the changes onto 8" floppy disks (kids, ask your parents) and mailing them to each of the branches that covered the majority of the state.
It was also where we could recreate real life transactions to help trouble shoot problems a branch may be experiencing. There was a switch on the wall that you would flick from test to production to make sure that changes you made did not go live.
It was my job to test the programs in the mock room. I spent many hours in that room opening accounts, running transactions, testing the printers for accuracy, and then making copies of the disks to send to the banks.
Imagine my surprise when I came in to work one Monday morning to find security and my boss waiting for me at the door.
I smiled and walked past them not having a clue why they were there, but whatever the reason it must be pretty serious since they were accompanied by a city police officer.
"Carole", Steve said as I put down my lunch box and hung up my jacket. "Can you come over here, we have a question for you."
"Sure", oh boy, I think I'm the one that's in trouble, what did I do now? Scanning my head for things I may have done recently I approached the group.
"Were you in the testing bay last Friday?" Steve asked.
"Well, yes, you know I was. The books for Osseo State Bank weren't lining up correctly so I was working on the program and testing changes."
Still no clue.
"Did you open an account to test with?" Steve continued.
"You know I did, it is always the routine." I pulled out the test book I had been working on. "Here, this is the book".
"Did you remember to flip the switch?"
Uhhhhh - knowing I have trouble remembering what I had for breakfast, I truly could not give him an honest answer.
"I think so" I said quietly.
"Well, the bank auditors show a transaction coming from this room for $1,000,000"
"Oh, no", "That can't be right - I didn't - I mean - *sigh*" "I had no idea".
Just then Augie came into the room, walked over to the patch panel and switched it from "Test" to "Production"
Everyone looked at each other - Augie was working on a different coding problem and needed to be on the production network. "Augie", Steve said "were you working on the production side on Friday?". "Yes, I've been troubleshooting a problem that Deerfield has with their mainframe. I have to be on production for that" Augie explained.
"Did you know Carole was working on Osseo's updates?" Steve asked.
"No" came the answer from Augie. Oblivious to the number of extra people in the room, Augie grabbed his coffee cup and headed out of the room.
The officers all looked at each other and the room got quite. Then, I think it was Steve, the laughter began. It was low at first but quickly turned into a relieved roar.
Augie returned to the room, sat down, and booted up his computer.
Well - you can probably figure out what happened. I was working in the outer training area on my change on the test side, then Augie switched to production to work on his. I didn't notice the change and opened the account and began playing with the bank book printing.
Steve stood up for us, it truly was an honest mistake and bad office testing area setup design.
Seeing as I did not move on the account at all, I was very, very, very lucky that the security and police believed the story and closed the incident with the necessary paperwork.
But if you think about it - I was actually a millionaire for the weekend. I'm glad all that money didn't change who I am!
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