square One & Some Garbage

Back to Square One
After a couple of weeks, I went back to work at SRL, and found my absence had cost me a promotion from Research Assistant to Research Associate. I thought to myself that RF had also assumed I would not continue after my delivery – he had received the news of my pregnancy coldly, which to me clearly signified disapproval.

In fact, I had no job that summer, and no surety of one in the fall semester. I started to scan the wanted bulletins in the unversity departments, but within a few days,I was assured I would get my place back in SRL in the Fall.

Though Matti and I had to visit a number of towns in Illinois to train interviewers, none of them was specially interesting. Of course, Chicago was the exception but anyway, we had no time for sight-seeing. However, Ramu and I did see quite a bit of Chicago on a couple of visits during our stay in Illinois. We enjoyed the windy city's lake front, great buildings, museums and window shopping. Salem, Abraham Lincoln's hometown, was another fascinating visit for a very different reason. It is a museum piece, where the houses and public buildings have been restored to their original status, and their furniture, household artifacts, kitchen and farm equipment intact. Most interesting to note that just over a hundred years back, these resembled what one finds in our present day small town and villages.

Garbage in, Garbage Out.
Since both office work and later my thesis involved computerisation, I learnt some basic Fortran programming on the job. Not really enough to stick, and later in both spheres we switched to a packaged social science program, SPSS, that made the need it unnecessary to input the Fortran commands as such. One could deal more with recognisable English! However, while using Fortran, I like most people made stupid mistakes like missing a comma or adding it, etc., and so after punching the cards and verifying them, taking them to the computer center, often late at night, one would find the next day that an error message would come back, and one was at square one! We used the phrase 'Garbage in, garbage out!' [gigo] pretty regularly in those days!
Actually, office data were dealt with by other assistants most of the time, and later we got a terminal in our office itself – that communicated with the main frame 360 computer at the center. Nowadays, one may have to describe this setup for those used only to PCs, laptops, hand-helds and mobile email-enabled devices. The main frame computers were as large as a small car and housed in an air-conditioned room that was treated like an ICU. One almost felt like whispering in hushed tones there! The laborious task of punching cards that were physically fed into the machine was followed by an equally tiresome one of verifying them. If all the cards came out undamaged in these two processes, the computer itself sometimes mangled the cards. So on top of gigo, this problem also plagued every user.

Ramu and I took our prelims as by now our respective advisers had convinced us that we might as well go in for our doctorates with the good record we had in our courses. We could have got our masters degrees on the strength of these exams, but we did not bother as we both did have the same degrees already.