Friday, December 20, 2013

The Lords of COBOL

I just received this extremely urgent communique from Sara Armstrong, RNC Chief Operating Officer, informing me -- with a foot-tapping, arms-crossed, barely controlled impatience -- that the Affordable Care Act would have been repealed already if I'd just been a little more diligent about checking my spam folder!
We’re waiting on your signature
Scott,
We are minutes away from sending our Freedom of Information Act letter to the Obama Administration demanding answers as to why the ObamaCare website still doesn't work. 
But we're waiting on your signature to send it. 
I'm sorry, Sara.  I've been clicking on your link to GOP.com, but it keeps timing out and crashing.
We just found out that the enrollment records of about 15,000 people, who thought they'd signed up for insurance on the ObamaCare website, did not get transmitted to the insurance companies.
Thank goodness you're on the job, Sara.  To paraphrase conservative hero Tom Joad, "Wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there, accusing them of playing the Knockout Game. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up on a guy, I'll be there, stealing pictures from the victim's Facebook page to prove he's a hoodie-wearning thug.  And wherever there's a laid off guy or a kid with a pre-existing condition who might get health insurance, I'll be there, blasting out alarmist fundraising demands so we can stop that shit cold."
The Obama Administration failed to fix the critical feature on the ObamaCare website that makes this transfer. And as a result, thousands of Americans still aren't enrolled.
Yeah, but...that's what you want, isn't it?  I mean, the Koch Brothers alone are spending millions of dollars to persuade people not to sign up for healthcare, therefore you ought to be in favor of anything which hampers the application process.  So I guess my question is: just what the hell am I signing?  Is it a petition demanding improved website performance (and if so, I'm probably the wrong person to spearhead this project, since I know less than nothing about computer languages.  To take one illustrative example, a friend mentioned that Grace Hopper was honored on the Google homepage the other day, and started talking about COBOL, and I couldn't figure out if he meant that planet in Mormonism where God lives [which Google tells me is actually Kolob], or that planet in Battlestar Galactica where all the gods live [here I was a little warmer, since that one turned out to be Kobol]), or is it just a proclamation that says "nyah-nyah-nyah," or perhaps, "neener-neener-neener," like we're all gathering in the conference room to sign a birthday card for a coworker, but being huge dicks about it?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We must demand the Obama Administration release the real ObamaCare figures -- not just the ones that sound or look good for the Democrats.
Well why didn't you say so?  I've got those figures right here...they're 36-23-26.  Exactly the same as Marilyn Monroe, which is why Democrats find the Affordable Care Act so fuckable.
Barack Obama needs to stop lying to the American people. Clearly the ObamaCare website still is not "fixed" or functional.
All evidence to the contrary (California alone is signing people up at a rate of 15,000 a day, so the 15,000 whose information didn't make it to the insurance companies should be cancelled out, oh, about...now).  Not that the high bullshit content of your panhandling appeal excuses my holding up the whole thing with my tardy signature.
Join us in demanding the truth today -- sign our "Freedom of Information Act" letter.
I gotta say, Sara, you've been brutally honest about my lazy autographing, and I appreciate the tough love, so I'm going to be equally frank with you, and say that like Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston, who doesn't believe in a free lunch, I don't believe in free information.  If you want these enrollment figures, you should earn them by sweeping up an elementary school cafeteria, just to guarantee that you learn the kind of work ethic that'll keep you out of jail and off the dole.
Thanks, 
Sara Armstrong
RNC Chief Operating Officer
Contribute Now
You're welcome.  Unfortunately, I can't offer you any money (things are tight, and it's the holidays), so please consider this post my humble contribution.

8 comments:

Bogie said...

Us Democrats like hips, so make it 36-23-36.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Believe it or don't, I once had a jerb which required me to use PL/1 (a hybrid animal of FORTRAN AND COBOL).

So...now you know.
~

bjkeefe said...

I never got as far along as ifthe, but I, too, made good money hacking Fortran. Some of the existing code base wasn't even as far along as F77! Ah, the glory days of the arithmetic IF and the computed GOTO.

Anonymous said...

Hey, Brendan, move over for the Queen of Obsolescence.
I trained on COBOL and FORTRAN, did my accounting on Lotus 123.
Now, I own an Internet Cafe which works on them old big PCs, know nothing about laptops and smartphones.
Suezboo
(Buggywhip champion of the 21st century)

acrannymint said...

The only COBOL, I ever wrote was to verify that MicroFocus (or as I referred to it - M-effin) COBOL would work post 2000 on an AIX (IBM's UNIX offering)system. We all knew it would but had to demonstrate it anyway. My first programming assignment for my first IT job was to write a FORTRAN program that would parse VAX system logs to determine system utilization that would feed a cost charge back system.

grishaxxx said...

What miserable people.

Carl said...

I trained on COBOL and FORTRAN, did my accounting on Lotus 123.

I wrote hex assembly code for the IBM 360/370 lines.

And I owned a Peanut.

Weird Dave said...

I like hexadecimal.

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