(from Here’s a Good One: Pencil-Pushers).
I’m the last Unix Engineer standing, managing the Frankensteinian infrastructure of three merged companies under a Texas State entity. Picture this: Tandems, Unix, Windows servers, imaging systems, and Xerox high-speed printers—a tech jamboree working in harmony to churn out claims across Texas. While I’m not the only Engineer here, most of my colleagues are Windows administrators. And let’s be real—Windows admins are basically power users with fancier job titles (everyone not named Willie Wilson).
This operation processes 100,000 pages of claims every day. The Tandem systems are the crown jewels, fine-tuned by wizards who write software so low-level it’s practically whispering to the hardware. Sub-second response time? Achieved. These machines are so good, they’d laugh in binary at your gaming PC.
Now, imagine a massive data stream starting with these Tandems, zipping through Windows servers (trying their best not to lag), passing an imaging server, and ending with a Xerox beast spitting out hundreds of thousands of letters daily. It’s beautiful when it works. But when it doesn’t? That’s where the story gets spicy.
Case in point: a Xerox field engineer called me—not one of the dozens of Windows admins—about an NFS mount issue on a Windows PC hooked to a high-speed Xerox printer. Why me? Your guess is as good as mine (maybe not, I’m betting it’s Unix).
It took me ten minutes to spot the problem. The PC was running Windows Home edition. Yes, the tcp/ip stack was having a full-blown existential crisis because it’s not designed for enterprise anything. When I asked the engineer why he was using Windows Home, he admitted the company didn’t send him a PC, so he grabbed an EZ-PC from Frye’s. Frye’s! I half-expected him to say he installed the OS off a cereal box prize.
Let’s just say there are too many things wrong with that picture for me to unpack without a drink.
So, what was the point of the PC attached to the high-speed Xerox printer? The PC is used to augment the formatting of the final output produced on the Xerox. In other words, it’s a simple way to add a signature. Once the letters are printed, the staff would cart the final letters to a department that would actually scan the letters before they were mailed. This was unnecessary since the final images could have been offloaded to repository and saved.