The Numbers Report

While working in IT production support at the local University, a University user called in somewhat upset and worried that her 'Numbers Report' was missing. When we asked her to give us more information, like report name, report number...she was unable to. It was simply, a 'Numbers Report'. It came every day, and she was worried that it was missing.

Perplexed, we made the trip across campus to see a copy of the report. The user said she saved copies of the report every day, going back some time.

When we go to her office, sure enough...there were stacks and stacks of Green-bar paper up against a wall. We are talking major tree homicide folks. Each daily report was over an inch thick, stacked high...there were thousands of them.

The output was IBM system dump information from a program that was abending. Daily, for years.

 To anyone but the most serious of system analysts, the output was useless, meaningless. And it did look like numbers, her name for the 'report'  made perfect sense. However, unless you were a journeyman IBM programmer, the numbers had little real meaning.  This user had been stacking these 'reports' up for months, even years.

Apparently, when we went back to the office to find out what had happened to  cause the daily output dumps from occurring, we discovered that one of the developers had found the program in error and had fixed it, causing the dumps to stop happening.  The developer had no idea that these dumps were actually printing and that someone was receiving the dumps via the campus delivery service. They had just seen the issue and corrected it.

We called the user and assured her that the missing reports were not a problem. We also advised her that she could destroy the existing stack of reports, that they would no longer be needed. Hesitantly she

Do we all have our own 'Numbers Reports'  in our lives that we stack up without thinking about them?


P.S.  The word 'abending' gets flagged as a spelling error by Word. So does 'abend'. Yet, in the IBM development world it is a very common word. In the IBM parlance, it stands for 'abnormal end'.  So, to summarize 'old developers take one final dump before they abend'.