"Just one member of the IT department was trained to use the AS/400, but the rest of the small tech team helped each other out because some jobs ran overnight and someone needed to be awake to log on from home by modem to get them going. Sometimes those jobs failed, but competition for time on the AS/400 was fierce so it was worth the attempt."
"Eventually he spotted an empty queue and, despite knowing it wasn't the right resource, decided to use it. Half a heartbeat later, the job finished. The point of this late-night login regime was to run workloads through the wee hours when nobody else was around. Leo therefore assumed the sudden conclusion of the job indicated an error and called his supervisor to confess and ask how to restart the job."
"Leo therefore assumed the sudden conclusion of the job indicated an error and called his supervisor to confess and ask how to restart the job. "My supervisor was flabbergasted, not by what I thought was an error or how quickly the job ran, but because it had never occurred to her or anyone else to use that queue, which had the highest priority of all queues," Leo told Who, Me?"
Leo provided network and software support for a specialty vehicle manufacturer in the early 1990s that ran both a mainframe and an AS/400 midrange machine. Only one team member was trained on the AS/400, so the small IT team shared responsibilities for overnight jobs by logging in from home. One night a system issue prevented access to the assigned processing queue, so Leo used an empty, unintended queue. The job completed immediately because the queue had the highest priority. That discovery led to a change in standard procedure to use the high-priority queue for overnight processing.
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