Tales of Mrs. Rice

[Tdarcos]

i have a few stories about my first real long-term full-time employer. Back during roughly 1982 or 1983-1987, I worked for Patricia Rice, a real estate broker, tax preparer, and IRS Enrolled Agent. First, the backstory.

While I was looking for work, I was going over to Job Service (the fancy name the US Department of Labor gave to the 52 US Unemployment Departments) to search for job listings. I lived in Long Beach, CA, and was visiting the office there. I found a listing for a job for somebody who wanted a full-time computer programmer and bookkeeper. This was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, so I wrote down the sequence number and submitted a pick ticket. The clerk I saw mentioned I probably didn't want it, it was in La Mirada, a town on the far southeast edge of Los Angeles County, and it only paid minimum wage. Back then, I was desperate, I was having a hard time finding any work at all, other than occasional part-time assignments with Kelly Girl or one of the other temp work agencies.

In a scene reminiscent of the movie Kramer vs. Kramer, where he tells the recruiter who doesn't want to call because he thinks Kramer doesn't want to take a downward salary adjustment, Kramer tells him either the recruiter will call them, or he will, and if he does, the recruiter won't get the commission, I insisted the guy at Job Service get me an appointment. So he did. I took the bus over there, about two hours, and find the place.

It's in a residence, a house located on a corner on a residential street. I knock, and am invited in by Evelyn, Mrs. Rice's secretary. I then meet with Mrs. Rice, who needed a computer person because she was drowning in paper because her finances were not in order. She needed someone to enter the data on the computer from all her checks, credit card statements, bills, and other minutiae. I guess I impressed her, because she hired me, basically for a 9-5 job, 5 days a week, starting at minimum wage, $3.75 an hour, doing this for however long it took. In the end, that turned out to be a little over four years.

La Mirada, as I said earlier, is at the southeastern edge of Los Angeles County, about as far as you can go and still be in the county. Mrs. Rice's house was on;y about two blocks from the county line, walk three blocks, and you're in Orange County. In addition to owning several rental houses, and running a tax preparation business, she also owned some properties out-of-state, that were managed by management companies. She also managed a 16-unit apartment building, that she and two partners owned. The computer I would be using was an Apple ii, and it used a check-processing program written in Applesoft Basic. But that was what I would use, to input years of financial information. Mrs. Rice realized that the job of keeping her records in order had gotten too big for her to do, and operate all of her businesses. Beyond this, her husband Glynn was a truck driver for Ralph's Grocery Company. So this was an upper-middle-class family, They also had three adult daughters who had their own families, living in nearby cities.

i would later find out just how badly she needed a dedicated bookkeeper when I found out one of the reasons she had to hire someone was that she had about $25,000 in outstanding client bills. No, I don't mean she owed $25,000, I mean she was owed that by customers she hadn't gotten around to sending out bills to. And despite the fact she did the taxes for several hundred clients, she hadn't been able to file her own taxes on time for several years.

Over the years I discovered a number of things about her and her family. My job involved collecting and entering all the checks into the checking account recording program. It allowed entry of check number, amount, date, who it was written to, and what it was for. Well, I find one check for several hundred dollars to an investigations company, and I ask what property to assign it to. I discover its not for any property. "It was to find out my husband was cheating on me."

Back when their daughters were young, and she and Glynn would go out somewhere, they would hire a babysitter to watch them. Well, this babysitter was 16-years-old, and apparently she and Glynn took a liking to each other. So, Mrs. Rice has to try and resolve this situation, before her husband gets arrested for "'unlawful sexual intercourse." (California does not have statutory rape, instead the law correctly declares consensual sex with a minor under 18 as this offense.) It is still a felony which can be punished by several years imprisonment. As this would be a disaster, she has to prevent it from becoming one.

She goes to talk to the girl's mother, who, when finding out about this, is visibly angry, calls her daughter in, and smacks her one, saying, "How could you be so stupid and get caught?"

One time her husband's sister-in-law (married to Glynn's brother, I presume, since she was also "Mrs. Rice") comes to visit on vacation for a week. At one point, I get a call asking for her, so I call out "Theresa Rice?" When asked why I didn't call her Mrs. Rice too, I said, "you don't get to be formally treated with respect; you don't sign my paycheck," which everyone there thought was funny. (I never called Mrs. Rice by any name except that; I never once referred to her as Patricia.)

Later I will talk about why I spent $20 of her money looking for 1c.

[Tdarcos]

Why I had to rewrite the checking account program.

We had a check writing program, back before spreadsheet programs like Visicalc, or much of anything else we would take for granted today. The program was written in Applesoft Basic, and included the source code. I ended up making several changes to that program.

The routine that sorted checks was very slow. Create a file with a month's worth of records, and it could take 90 minutes to sort them. I examine the program ad discover whoever wrote it had picked the worst possible way to do a sort. You scan the first item against every one in the file, then if you find a lower entry, you swap the two. But then, it goes back to the first entry and scans all the items all over again.

I simplified this. After the swap, I continued searching, this time using the new first record as the target to search for a lower entry. Once I get to the bottom, I know the first item is the lowest one, so I don't need to scan it again, I start over with the second item, then the third, and so on, This is probably the best I can do because there wasn't a convenient source of knowledge available at my fingertips as now. In any case, this cut the sort time by 1/2. Still 45 minutes, but I didn't have a resource to find a better algorithm.

When listing checks, it showed them roughly 10 to a page, listing them with each of the fields on a single line. Check Number, date, name, purpose, amount and a blank line. At one point I was having trouble with figuring out what was where, so I wrote a 'quick and dirty" routine to write them in a condensed form: Each check on one line, if a field was too wide to fit I truncated the display of that item, allowing me to display about 60 items a page. Mrs. Rice comes out one day, looks at my "quick and dirty" listing, and asks, "How come we're not doing it this way?" Well, you don't have to hit me in the side of the head with a two-by-four, I made that the new display format for all new printed listings of checks.

One day, my boss calls me into her office and informs me the numbers are wrong. The program is getting incorrect results. With a bit of research, i discover there is an error in Applesoft Basic's floating-point routines. Small, unnoticeable errors in the internal values of each item add up to a discrepancy when summed. So I find an elegant solution. I change the internal representation of all checks to be integers. $7.50 is stored as 750, $104.35 as 10435, etc. When printing or displaying, I'd use the truncated value of the number /100, to get dollars, then the original number minus the truncated umber * 100 for the cents. Since all arithmetic is performed with integers, this eliminates the rounding errors.

After a year or two of this, Mrs. Rice decides to buy an IBM PC clone, a white box 8086 with two floppy drives and 256K of memory. I owned a )pirated) copy of MS-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3. I had a data cable to connect the serial port on the Apple II to the PC (both use incompatible disc formats), and transfer the checking accounts as CSV items so they can be imported into Lotus. Well, I have a month's worth of check data, and have it sort it, figuring that will take a while, only it comes back almost instantly. I figure there must be a problem, so I try again, same thing. I think maybe I tried doing a sort descending instead, and the same response, only it was in reverse order.

I think it dawned on me that there was nothing wrong, it simply had done the sort that fast. The same sort that took 45 minutes on the Apple II took 1/2 second[ on the PC. We could now do an entire year's worth of records in one spreadsheet, or would have, except the PC ran out of memory. After having had it just two weeks, Mrs. Rice had to take it back to the computer store that built it, and buy an upgrade to boost the memory to 640K.

After about 6 months or so of this, Mrs Rice buys a second computer, so she can do her own searches. So, I teach her how to use Lotus 1-2-3, and she has fun working on the files I've done, changing some of the entries to take less room or be clearer. One example: the payee on the entry for each check she wrote each month to Union 76 Oil Company for gasoline purchases, could be shortened to just "76." Well, one day I'm on my computer, she's on hers, and she spent about two hours making changes and examining data in one of the spreadsheets, and she wants to know how to get know something, either how to exit Lotus or load another spreadsheet, I forget which. so I tell her the / commands to use, and I'm about to tell her she needs to save what she's doing first, but she's a little too fast for me. She blows two hours of work in about two seconds. Fortunately, since she had a better idea of what she wanted to do, doing it over only took about an hour, but she learned a valuable lesson on making sure you save your work.

Then there was Othello. No, not the Shakespearean character, but the board game where you flip opponent's color discs to your color. Well, I had a copy of a program which was written in GWBasic that allowed playing it on the computer. Mrs. Rice loved that program, she had fun playing it. One time she played against me, and I'm probably not very good at it. (I would not have occurred to me to throw a game at the time; if I could have beaten her, I would have.) Then she wanted me to change the program so it would save her scores so she could tell how well she did. This allowed her to see how well she did over time.

One thing I did was to write a check writing program. I wrote it in GWBasic, it used a menu system, you could add payees, select which ones were recurring bills (mortgage companies) and ones with a different amount (like electric or gasoline). It would then print out the results on check stock which was on tractor feed paper. I believe we were using "3 stub" checks, top stub, which said who it was to, amount, date, purpose and duplicate of their address she kept, second stub was the info we gave them (like account number, along with the address (I think we had window envelopes for that purpose). Third stub, of course, was the check. This was useful, since I think she sent out about 30 or more checks a month. Car payment, mortgages on 8 properties plus utilities, photocopier rental, gas, management companies, etc.