COBOL, French Fries and Roger’s Sprite

“The computer is a moron.”  ~ Peter Drucker; Management Consultant.

“Cobol is Fun!”  That was the enthusiastic claim made the first evening by the instructor in the COBOL class that I was taking with my friend Scott at the College of San Mateo. I'm certain that Scott and I exchanged a derisive rolling of the eyes.  If COBOL was fun he was going to have to prove it.  A few weeks in and we knew that he was either a liar or just plain loony.  With his stout frame cloaked in a bright red blazer Scott and I immediately christened him Hank Stram after the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs football team who wore a similar red blazer while roaming the sidelines.  It seemed to us that there could only be two men in the entire world who would wear a scarlet blazer. One because it was his team's color and the other because he apparently had no fashion sense. 

It was the late seventies and I suppose Scott and I were taking COBOL in order to get a jump start on the burgeoning computer revolution.  COBOL is a language; a computer language and the acronym stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language and it was one of the first classes you took on the way to becoming a programmer.  In the end, judging from my success, or lack of same, I would have been just as well served taking Biblical Greek. We must have imagined ourselves pioneers in a growing field that would be gushing high paying jobs.  Well, if we were pioneers we were the computer age version of the Donner Party because in no time we were hopelessly lost in a wilderness of confusion and frustration. 

As with any language the idea was to gain a functional usage.  In COBOL, that meant writing a program that would run successfully from start to finish.  In those olden days we would write out the code that would be punched onto a deck of stiff IBM punch cards that would then be fed to the computer.  If the code and the subsequent cards were all correct we would get a report on green bar computer paper showing a complete run. Unlike Spanish where I could fudge a little or slide in a word of Italian (which I was fluent in) COBOL was brutally unforgiving.  It only took one error in the code to produce a shortened report that ended with the two dreaded words, STOP RUN which ended with the students’ two words, “Oh fuck.”  My recollection is that there was a lot of oh fucking going on in that class. 

That damned COBOL 

COBOL was not fun.  It was a frustrating, discouraging succession of STOP RUNS and “Oh fucks.” If the damn computer was supposed to be so smart why couldn't it get its instructions in plain English?  The class might have had a fun sidebar for Scott who started abandoning computer code for an altogether different and much more ancient code; that of attracting the opposite sex, in this case a fellow student named Jane.  For me it was a drudgery that was relieved only by “Hank’s” announcement that it was break time.  It certainly didn't help that “Hank’s” breaks were usually a ridiculous 30 minutes; long enough for boredom to germinate the notion of a beer at the Mediterranean, a local pizza parlor/pub.

At the slightest thought of the Mediterranean there was no turning back.  It never was A beer.  It was always many beers, served up by an old acquaintance and vagabond named Roger.  He was a jolly Roger and generous to a fault (a larcenous one) as sometimes we paid full ride and others it was “on the house;” Roger’s house, certainly not the owner’s.  One fateful evening he offered us some Sprite; Roger’s Sprite as he called it, which meant it was laced with a mighty and unhealthy portion of bourbon (quite illegal since the joint was only licensed for beer and wine).  I washed down a burger with a few Roger’s Sprites and then he brought us what must have been a bucketful of French fries, saying in a wacky bit of understatement that he’d made “a few too many.”  After a few too many fries and far too many Roger’s Sprites I staggered outside and blew the entire load onto the parking lot.  This was great fun for Roger who’d followed us out roaring with laughter.  Between heaves, I saw a blurred double vision of Roger through eyes that were clouded by misery and bourbon as he bellowed at Scott, “We call him LW, that means light weight.”  It was a night that still lives in infamy and while LW never actually stuck with me it somehow got attached to my girlfriend, Linda Wong who was totally innocent and not even present and whose only crime was in her initials.  Forevermore she was christened “L-Dub” and even to this day when she comes up in conversation it’s as “L-Dub,” which conjures up a twisted nostalgia of COBOL, French fries and Roger’s Sprite.

Sometime shortly after that, my computer education came to a STOP RUN.  Frustration, lack of interest and too many beer breaks caused me to drop the class.  Scott’s experience was equally short lived.  As he recalls it, "After having the (COBOL) program run aborted for the umpteenth time, I grabbed the (punch card) deck and headed for the parking lot.  I had no intention of completing the class and probably dropped it the next day.  Anyway, I was in the parking lot and had a memory flash of the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the scene where Mary tosses her beret into the air.  I did the same thing with the card deck, which fluttered to Earth like snow falling.”

With that our plans of being computer programmers found their ends in parking lots; Scott’s amidst a flurry of punch cards and mine in a putrid pile of bile, bourbon and a few too many French fries.