It Only Hurts When I Hit

Some days you’re the one!

And some days you’re the zero.

But no matter what, computer programmers always do their bit.

In the real world of information technology, programmers can go from hero to zero in a nanosecond. Sometimes we are master pastry chefs, kneading, molding, and shaping fine data into intricate informational croquembouches for our clients’ consumption. But many of us work in organizations where our users, co-workers, and managers seem to be operating in states of perpetual stack overflow. So all too often, we are dung beetles—gathering, shaping, and rolling heaping piles of dirty data into balls of muck that are buried deep within corporate data stores.

This book contains 2**4 true stories about programmers, geeks, and techies who labor in that sweetest of all workplaces, the space between the keyboard and the chair. Stories about:

• Surviving the job interview from hell

• Battling the office coffee machine

• Pranking other programmers

• Hunting down the mysterious bathroom snacker

• Enduring the office bully • Debating the break room candy machine’s true yield

• Settling scores with a backstabber

• Making a splash at a going-away party

. . . were extracted from the author’s past, transformed into de-identifiable accounts, and loaded into this publication for your amusement.

So journey from the bowels of frigid data centers to the overcrowded cubicle farms of corporate America and meet some of the programming professionals who put their grubby, grimy, greasy fingers all over your data.

Michael A. Raithel works as a senior systems analyst for the premier contract research organization in the Washington, DC area. He has been a computer programmer in mainframe, UNIX, Linux, and Windows environments in both the commercial and government sectors since 1980. Michael has written five books on SAS software usage and is the author of more than 25 SAS technical papers.  He is a popular lecturer at SAS Global Forum, regional SAS conferences, and at local SAS users groups. A copy of his firstbook, Tuning SAS Applications in the MVS Environment, resides in the Smithsonian Institution of American History's Permanent Research Collection of Information Technology.

Michael is a lifelong gym rat and avid runner.  He has completed 10 marathons including the 2013 and 2014 Boston Marathons, the 2014 Tokyo Marathon, and the 2015 London Marathon. He would have written a longer bio, but he had to run.

You can follow Michael on LinkedIn, access all of his SAS publications via tinyurl.com/jkufjxx, or drop him a nice note at maraithel@gmail.com