In Which Karl Gets Richly Rewarded For Work That's Simply Divine <OR>
Karl: Konsultant to the Stars

It was a slow day for me. Someone had Novell problems, someone had LAN Manager problems, someone else thought tar on their Unix box meant to oil the thing. What a mess.

I was flipping through some of my magazines that had stacked up (about four feet up, actually) waiting for the phone to ring. The knock at the door caught me by surprise. Since I work from home, door knocks are rare except when a neighbor wants me to feed their cat while they go out of town.

This was no neighbor I recognized. She was blonde, dressed all in white, and actually seemed to glow from within. Shadows were created in my entry hall, so it wasn't just my imagination.

"We need your help," she said in a clear soprano. "Our system is being overloaded, and we need to decide on the proper upgrade."

"Of course, I'll be glad to help. Where is your computer center?"

"Here," she said, and touched my hand. There was a flash of light, and my entry hall became huge, with white marble columns and gold flecks in the white marble floor. The sign on the door said Central MIS. The door opened, and a huge guy with a full white beard and rippling muscles waved us in.

"Glad you're here, Karl," he said to me. "Our system is being pushed beyond capacity, and we need to get a clear future direction in place before everything crashes down on us."

In the center of the room was a wheezing AT&T 3B2, loaded with all the extra disks, I/O boards and memory possible. Serial cables snaked away in every direction, attached to green phosphor monitors so old I swear I saw barnacles.

"Boy, this system has been obsolete for years," I said.

"Seems like centuries, actually," said the guy, whom I guessed was the MIS Director. "We have over a billion active records, with another four billion potential customers in the data base."

"You must be a magician to keep running this long with a system this old," I said.

"Magic is one of the job requirements, but even I can't watch things every minute."

We got to work. The Director was amazed at the new features in SVR4, and he decided on some multi-processor boxes, some fault tolerant systems, and a new Unix mainframe with a half-acre disk farm. The monitors were replaced with PC's running concurrent Novell and TCP/IP protocol stacks. Everything was tied together with 10Base-T Ethernet (he really liked that name, Ethernet) and FDDI links between the hosts. I told him that some of his magic would be necessary to make the PC front ends work properly with the Unix back ends and data base engines.

"But the literature you brought says it all works right out of the box," he complained.

"Personally," I said, "I think there should be a special place in Hell for some of these marketing people."

"I'll see to it," he answered. Strange guy, I thought. But he catches on quickly, and money doesn't seem to be a problem.

When we finished the design, and I answered all his questions, he shook my hand and turned me over to his assistant to take me back home. "You have done more good for more people than you realize, Karl my friend," he said. "You have my eternal thanks."

His assistant touched my arm, and when my eyes cleared from the flash, I saw we were back by my front door. As I opened the door for her, I asked, "Where do I send the bill?"

She laughed. "We're not that crude. You will find double your day rate in what looks to you to be a miracle. Enjoy it; you've earned it."

She left, and I stood shaking my head for a moment. What a strange dream, I thought. Since I was standing by the door, I decided to go get the mail.

Along with the normal junk and four more magazines, there was a letter from the IRS. Seems some of my last return was computed in error, and there was a check inside for $2000 and a letter of apology.

"Wow," I said, to an empty sidewalk. "Whoda thunk it. What a lucky day." I made out a deposit slip, then started digging into the pile of magazines once again.

James: Subtle, huh? Any doubts that Open Systems Today editors felt they had a mission to make the world safer for Unix? I was not the first to suggest Unix provided supernatural answers for some users, and plenty of people want to argue that the Rats in Redmond are far less than divine.