It’s the early ’80s and pilot fish is working at a company with several remote job entry (RJE) stations across the country. It makes it easy to print batch reports tailored to each location.

One of the reporting jobs has an abend that causes it to send a dump to one of the RJE sites, and it’s weeks before the programmers notice, because the dump doesn’t print at headquarters.

When the abend finally is noticed, the job is quickly fixed. The next day, though, the programmer gets a call from the operator at an RJE, who asks, “Where’s my numbers report?”

“What numbers report?” says the puzzled programmer.

“Every morning I was getting this big report that had nothing but columns of numbers on it, and now it’s not coming out anymore.”

Discontinued, says the programmer, who goes on to explain that the operator can throw away all the ones he’s been keeping.

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