MAINFRAME MALFEASANCE
by Jared Goldstein

It wouldn't be so bad having to deal with this crusty old mainframe if it would do what I need it to every once in a while.
But no, that would make life too easy and the 'frame's purpose is clearly to further the opposite.

The thing plays games with me: I submit a job, it rejects it. I try to edit a file, it disconnects me. Expecting it to actually
compile my code (FORTRAN, and that's a whole 'nother rant) is apparently ludicrous, and the machine acts as if I
should worship it for the 0016 or 0008 error code it might spew out in response. Yes, I should get down on my very knees
and thank it for its vague encoded output. Nevermind the binary object file I was trying to create.

Fortunately, I have an old IBM manual that lists every compiler error code. Unfortunately, 0016 and 0008 aren't in there.
In fact, the whole page where they would be listed is missing. What is there appears to be a charred nub of paper that
should have been the page of interest.

Server room folklore has it that many years ago, before Y2k, a young naive engineer had been debugging the machine and
left the book, folded open to that page, on the mainframe chasis. I'm not going to speculate if the beast truly became
evil that day, or if it was a result of the engineer trying to swap out a perfectly good power supply, but legend has it
that the very page containing our savior error code descriptions burst into flames and vanished forever!

So, yours truly is left trying to appease the 'frame in order to get my work done. If I'm lucky, it won't delete all of
my source code this week.

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