Conrad without con

This is a blog devoted to raising and resolving instances of cognitive dissonance.

So, how to resolve the dissonance of the blog's name? For, "con" means roughly "with", and "with without with" seems a bit dissonant, besides being self-contradictory. (After all, "with" without "w i t h" would just be the empty string, leaving just "out" after substitution throughout).

Hopefully, over time, the posts will give enough examples of resolution, thus resolving the dissonance of the blog's title.

The name of the blog is also meant as a pattern of sorts, as I am self-imposing a constraint on blog post titles. The promise that I am making, as I start the blog, is that post titles will be of the form "Con[x] without con[y]" where [x] and [y] will be the remainder (possibly empty, as [y] is here) of words beginning with "con-".

Now, moving on to this initial post, which ought to be subtitled, "The French connection."

In the 1970's my work took me to the computing center of INSEE, the French census bureau, located in Lille. At the time, I lived in Châtenay-Malabry, a suburb of Paris, and commuted, mostly by train (about two hours each way). The company for which I worked, CAP Sogeti Logiciel, allowed me to work four ten hour days a week, so that I only commuted weekly, and had room and board with a very nice couple in Lille for the nights and meals spent away from home.

The system administrator at the computing center was a great guy, whom I learned to like (and whose name I wish I could remember). My initial interaction with him is the subject of this post. At that time in the history of computing, there were no personal computers. Instead, computers were very large, very expensive, and ran very hot. So, this one was contained in a large room which was air conditioned, and had a false floor for all the cables combining the various components. The entire room was much less powerful than one of today's laptop computers, and it was shared by dozens of users, all software engineers. It also required an operator, actually operators, who worked in shifts around the clock. The whole operation involved many employees. Work was prepared on punched cards with each bit of work called a "job". A job was at least a dozen or so cards, and often hundreds of cards. It was submitted to the operator, who had it read into the computer. When its turn came, the computer executed (obeyed, or carried out) the instructions specified on the punched cards. These instructions were written in Job Control Language (JCL). The result of the execution was printed on continuous, fan-folded paper, and available from the operator when the job was finished, as he or she got around to separating the outputs and delivering them to a room where they were sorted into bins according the the job name.

The syntax of JCL requires that the first card of the job look like this:

//JOBNAME  JOB

Where "JOBNAME" is replaced by a name of the submitter's choosing, consisting of letters and digits but starting with a letter. To keep things under control, the system administrator of the Lille facility had refined the requirement so that the first card must look like this:

//XYZ9999  JOB

Where the pattern XYZ9999 is meant to show the form of the name of the job, with XYZ indicating the first three letters of the family name of the person submitting the job and 9999 indicating a unique number. Since the first three letters of my family name are "con" and since "con" is a word unfit for proper public conversation in French, I sought an exception to the rule. The operator snickered and then told me that an exception would probably not be made, but that I could always go and ask the system administrator anyway. When I knocked at his door, he lifted his head reluctantly from his work and the conversation went something like this. Of course, I didn't write it down or record it, so the dialog is fiction, and of course, it was also in French.

"Yes?"

"Could I get an exception to the job naming rule?"

"No," as his head went back down. Then as I turned to leave, "What is your last name?"

"Conrad."

"Your job names will begin CNR," he snapped, and went back to work.

Thus were the operators spared endless amusement, and myself oft-repeated embarrassment. My name was Conrad without "con" but rather Conrad as "cnr". The first card of the first job that I submitted was

//CNR0001  JOB

and over the next several months I submitted hundreds of jobs, each with a different number, but all with names beginning "CNR."

Finally, an unrelated anecdote--a bonus resolution. One of the officials of INSEE with whom we often worked when he visited from their head office in Paris always called me "Conrad" in our conversations. "Conrad" is a very common first given name in French, and rather uncommon as a family name. One day as we waited to board a train, he apologized for having always called me by my first name, but that that was the only name he knew for me. In France at the time, colleagues commonly called each other by the family name, generally dropping the leading "Monsieur" or "Madame" or "Mademoiselle" as familiarity increased, but only used given names when very, very familiar (which takes a lot of time in French society). He was relieved to learn that "Conrad" was my family name and that he had been correctly addressing me all along. Another bit of cognitive dissonance resolved.