Me, A wizard? Until a week, I was an astronomer, contentedly designing telescope optics. Looking back on it, I'd lived in an academic dreamland. All these years, never planning for the future, right up to the day my grant money ran out.

Lucky for me that my laboratory recycled used astronomers. Instead of standing in the unemployment line, I found myself transferred from the Keck Observatory at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, down to the computer center in the basement of the same building.

well, hell, I could fake enough computing to impress astronomers, and maybe pick it up fast enough that my co-workers wouldn't catch on. Still, a computer wizard? Not me---I'm an astronomer.

Now what? As I apathetically stared at my computer terminal, I still thought of planetary orbits and astrophysics. As new kid on the block, I had my choice of a cubicle with a window facing the Golden Gate Bridge, or an unventilated office with a wall of bookshelves. Swallowing my claustrophobia, I picked the office, hoping that nobody would notice when I slept under the desk. On either side were offices of two systems people, Wayne Graves and Dave Cleveland, the old hands of the system. I soon got to know my neighbors through their bickering.

Viewing everyone as incompetent or lazy, Wayne was crossthreaded with the rest of the staff. Yet he knew the system thoroughly, from the disk driver software up to the microwave antennas. Wayne was weaned on Digital Equipment Corporation's Vax computers and would tolerate nothing less: not IBM, not Unix, not Macintoshes.

Dave Cleveland, our serene Unix buddha, patiently listened to Wayne's running stream of computer comparisons. A rare meeting didn't have Wayne's pitch, "Vaxes are the choice of scientists everywhere and help build strong programs twelve ways." Dave retorted, "Look, you keep your Vax addicts happy and I'll handle the rest of the world." Dave never gave him the satisfaction of getting riled, and Wayne's complaints eventually trailed off to a mutter.

Great. First day on the job, sandwiched between two characters who were already ruining my daydreams with their periodic disputes.

At least nobody could complain about my appearance. I wore the standard Berkeley corporate uniform: grubby shirt, faded jeans, long hair, and cheap sneakers. Managers occasionally wore ties, but productivity went down on the days they did.

Together, Wayne, Dave and I were to run the computer s as a lab-wide utility. We managed a dozen mainframe computers---giant workhorses for solving physics problems, together worth around six million dollars. The scientists using the computer were supposed to see a simple, powerful computing system, as reliable as the electric company. This meant keeping the machines running full time, around the clock. And just like the electri company, we charged for every cycle of computing that was used.

Of four thousand laboratory employees, perhaps a quarter used the main computers. Each of these one thousand accounts was tallied daily, and ledgers kept inside the computer. With an hour of computing costing three hundred dollars, our bookkeeping had to be accurate. so we kept track of every page printed, every block of disk space, and every minute of processor time. A separate computer gathered these statistics and sent monthly bills to laboratory departments.

And so it happened that on my second day of work, Dave wandered into my office, mumbling about a hiccup in the Unix accouning system. Someone must have used a few seconds of computing without paying for it. The computer's books didn't quite balance; last month's bills of $2,387 showned a 75-cent shortfall.

Now, an error of a few thousand dollars is obvious and isn't hard to find. But errors in the pennies column arise from deeply buried problems, so finding these bugs is a natural test for a budding software wizard. Dave said that I ought to think about it.

"First-degree robbery, huh?" I responded.
"Figure it out, Cliff, and you'll amaze everyone," Dave said