Rachel started working as a web developer for the local bus company. The job made her feel young, since the buses, the IT infrastructure, and most of their back-office code was older than she was. The bus fare-boxes were cash only, and while you could buy a monthly pass, it was just a little cardboard slip that you showed the driver. Their accounting system ran on a mainframe, their garage management software was a 16-bit DOS application. Email ran on an Exchange 5.5 server.

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In charge of all of the computing systems, from the web to DOS, was Virgil, the IT director. Virgil had been hired back when the accounting mainframe was installed, and had nestled into his IT director position like a tick. The bus company, like many such companies in the US, was ostensibly a private company, but chartered and subsidized by the city. This created a system which had all the worst parts of private-sector and public-sector employment merged together, and Virgil was the master of that system.

Rachel getting hired on was one of his rare “losses”, and he wasn’t shy about telling her so.

“I’ve been doing the web page for years,” Virgil said. “It has a hit counter, so you can see how many hits it actually gets- maybe 1 or 2 a week. But management says we need to have someone dedicated to the website.” He grumbled. “Your salary is coming out of my budget, you know.”

That website was a FrontPage 2000 site, and the hit-counter was broken in any browser that didn’t have ActiveX enabled. Rachel easily proved that there was far more traffic than claimed, not that there was a lot. And why should there be? You couldn’t buy a monthly pass online, so the only feature was the ability to download PDFs of the hand-schedules.

With no support, Rachel did her best to push things forward. She redesigned the site to be responsive. She convinced the guy who maintained their bus routes (in a pile of Excel spreadsheets) to give her regular exports of the data, so she could put the schedules online in a usable fashion. Virgil constantly grumbled about wasting money on a website nobody used, but as she made improvements, more people started using it.

Then it was election season. The incumbent mayor had been complaining about the poor service the bus company was offering, the lack of routes, the costs, the schedules. His answer was, “cut their funding”. Management started talking about belt-tightening, Virgil started dropping hints that Rachel was on the chopping block, and she took the hint and started getting resumes out.

A miracle occurred. The incumbent mayor’s campaign went off the rails. He got caught siphoning money from the city to pay for private trips. A few local cops mentioned that they’d been called in to cover-up the mayor’s frequent DUIs. His re-election campaign’s finances show strange discrepancies, and money had come in that couldn’t be tied back to a legitimate contribution. He tried to get a newly built stadium named after himself, which wasn’t illegal, but was in poor taste and was the final straw. He dropped out of the election, paving the way for “Mayor Fred” to take over.

Mayor Fred was a cool Mayor. He wanted to put in bike lanes. He wanted to be called “Mayor Fred”. He wanted to make it easier for food trucks to operate in the city. And while he shared his predecessor’s complaints about the poor service from the bus company, he had a different solution, which he revealed while taking a tour of the bus company’s offices.

“I’m working right now to secure federal grants, private sector funding, to fund a modernization project,” Mayor Fred said, grinning from behind a lectern. “Did you know we’re paying more to keep our old buses on the road for five years than it would cost to buy new buses?” And thus, Mayor Fred made promises. Promises about new buses, promises about top-flight consultants helping them plan better routes, promises about online functionality.

Promises that made Virgil grumble and whine. Promises that the mayor… actually kept.

New buses started to hit the streets. They had GPS and a radio communication system that gave them up-to-the-second location reporting. Rachel got put in charge of putting that data on the web, with a public API, and tying it to their schedules. A group of consultants swung through to help, and when the dust settled, Rachel’s title was suddenly “senior web developer” and she was in charge of a team of 6 people, integrating new functionality to the website.

Virgil made his opinion on this subject clear to her: “You are eating into my budget!”

“Isn’t your budget way larger?” Rachel asked.

“Yes, but there’s so much more to spend it on! We’re a bus company, we should be focused on getting people moving, not giving them pretty websites with maps that tell them where the buses are! And now there’s that new FlashCard project!”

FlashCard was a big project that didn’t involve Rachel very much. Instead of cash fares and cardboard passes, they were going to get an RFID system. You could fill your card at one of the many kiosks around the city, or even online. “Online” of course, put it in Rachel’s domain, but it was mostly a packaged product. Virgil, of all people, had taken over the install and configuration, Rachel just customized the stylesheet so that it looked vaguely like their main site.

Rachel wasn’t only an employee of the bus company, she was also a customer. She was one of the first in line to get a FlashCard. For a few weeks, it was the height of convenience. The stop she usually needed had a kiosk, she just waved her card at the farebox and paid. And then, one day, when her card was mostly empty and she wasn’t anywhere near a kiosk, she decided to try filling her card online.

Thank you for your purchase. Your transaction will be processed within 72 hours.

That was a puzzle. The kiosks completed the transaction instantly. Why on Earth would a website take 3 days to do the same thing? Rachel became more annoyed when she realized she didn’t have enough on her card to catch the bus, and she needed to trudge a few blocks out of her way to refill the card. That’s when it started raining. And then she missed her bus, and had to wait 30 minutes for the next one. Which is when the rain escalated to a downpour. Which made the next bus 20 minutes late.

Wet, cold, and angry, Rachel resolved to figure out what the heck was going on. When she confronted Virgil about it, he said, “That’s just how it works. I’ve got somebody working full time on keeping that system running, and that’s the best they can do.”

Somebody working full time? “Who? What? Do you need help? I’ve done ecommerce before, I can-”

“Oh no, you’ve already got your little website thing,” Virgil said. “I’m not going to let you try and stage a coup over this.”

With an invitation like that, Rachel decided to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t hard to get into the administration features of the FlashCard website. From there, it was easy to see the status of the ecommerce plugin for processing transactions: “Not installed”. In fact, there was no sign at all that the system could even process transactions at all.

The only hint that Rachel caught was the configuration of the log files. They were getting dumped to /dev/lp1. A printer. Next came a game of hide-and-seek- the server running the FlashCard software wasn’t in their tiny data-center, which meant she had to infer its location based on which routers were between her and it. It took a few days of poking around their offices, but she eventually found it in the basement, in an office.

In that office was one man with coke-bottle glasses, an antique continuous feed printer, a red document shredder, and a FlashCard kiosk running in diagnostic mode. “Um… can I help you?” the man asked.

“Maybe? I’m trying to track down how we’re processing credit card transactions for the FlashCard system?”

The printer coughed to life, spilling out a new line. “Well, you’re just in time then. Here’s the process.” He adjusted his glasses and peered at the output from the printer:

TRANSACTION CONFIRMED: f6ba779d22d5;4012888888881881;$25.00

The man then kicked his rolly-chair over to the kiosk. The first number was the FlashCard the transaction was for, the second was the credit card number, and the third was the amount. He punched those into the kiosk’s keypad, and then hit enter.

“When it gets busy, I get real backed up,” he confessed. “But it’s quiet right now.”

Rachel tracked down Virgil, and demanded to know what he thought he was doing.

“What? It’s not like anybody wants to use a website to buy things,” Virgil said. “And if we bought the ecommerce module, the vendor would have charged us $2,000/mo, on top of an additional transaction fee. This is cheaper, and I barely have enough room in my budget as it is!”

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