WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29, 2023 - THE AHA MOMENT

 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29, 2023 - THE AHA MOMENT

There are times in my life (and I think everybody’s life) that I am going to call the “AHA” moment.  AHA - I got it!!  AHA - it makes sense now.  AHA - why did it take me so long to figure that out.

I had a friend who used his right hand up in the air making a motion like screwing in a lightbulb.  And, when the lightbulb turned on - it was the AHA moment.  It was dark but now it is light.  (Or even, the “I once was blind but now I see” moment).

Even commercials have made use of the AHA moment.  V-8 Vegetable Juice had commercials where the person sips another beverage slaps their forehead and says “I could have had a V-8.”  Maybe you can slap your forehead and say “DUH”.  

As a math major and a math teacher, I had my share of AHA moments - that makes sense.  I tried to reach my students so they could say “WOW - I get that now”.  I wondered why my previous HOA had a lock with the combination of 8421 - and I thought yes, that starts with 8, then half (so 4), then half again (2), and the last half (1).  It was until later that I reflected on my zip code at that time - and the zip code for Leander Texas was 78421.  So, the combination wasn’t half of anything - it was the zipcode just missing the first digit.  (That was kind of obvious once I saw it!!).

In 1978, after teaching high school math for seven years, I had the opportunity to teach college math!!!   I was teaching in the department of Math and Computer Science.  

My wife was a stay-at-home mom, so my income was important. Our family was young, our son was two and our daughter was less than a year.  The department chair said, “You know if you could teach a computer course, you could teach a summer class” (for extra money).  That sounded good.  The chair suggested I take the COBOL class in the spring semester and then teach it in the summer.  I already had FORTRAN and BASIC programming, so just another programming class (NOPE!!!).

So, I’m taking a COBOL class and our first assignment was basically to copy a program out of the textbook and put it on (yes) punched cards, and run it.  Sounds pretty easy - right?

Yes, this was in 1979 and we wrote programs for the mainframe computer on 80-column punched cards.  I had used punched cards for FORTRAN so that wasn’t going to be an obstacle.  But, COBOL was fussy with punched cards.  NOTHING went in columns 1 through 6 on the cards.  If you keyed in an asterisk (*) in column 7 it was a comment card.  Certain words had to start in column 8 and other commands had to wait until column 12 to start.  

These were the days when you took your stack of punched cards to the computer operations window, and the computer staff would eventually run my stack and print out the program. 

So, this was going to be a snap!!!  Type the program - word for word out of the book, make sure the statements were in the right columns, and succeed.  I was already counting my summer income from teaching COBOL.  

(Note - COBOL stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language.  I was in the department of math and computer science and my colleagues wrote their programs in FORTRAN - FORmula TRANslation which was very mathematical.  They had an adjunct teach COBOL because ‘real mathematicians wouldn’t use a business language).

Being sure of myself, I handed off my deck of punched cards to the operator and went off to teach a class.  Coming back about three hours later, I got my printout - and I had 107 serious errors!!!!  ONE-HUNDRED, SEVEN ERRORS!!  

My mind went OUCH - no summer teaching for me.  In my FORTRAN programs I might have just a few errors, but never more than 10.  

The printout gave me the code and if there was an error in that statement, it would say something like “illegal operation”.  Boy, it was going to take me hours to correct 107 errors.  I’d never get it done.  

So, I looked at my code.  My first line was:  INDENTIFICATION DIVISION, and the message was “unknown statement”.  I looked at the book and saw that the first line in a COBOL program was to be IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.  I had typed the first line wrong.  And, since the first line was wrong - every line after that was incorrect.

I hustled to a keypunch machine and created a new first card - IDENTIFICATION DIVISION - and submitted my program again.  This time I had about eight mistakes.  For the third time, I corrected those other eight mistakes (most of which were simple typos) and handed it back to the operator, and voila - the program ran correctly.

I had an “AHA” moment.  The light bulb went on.  It made sense.  

I aced the COBOL class and I thought COBOL that summer and for many, many years after that.  Eventually, we wrote our COBOL programs on PCs (personal computers) - but you still had to have the statements in the right columns, and spelled correctly.  But, I had learned.  

*****

I’ve had a lot of AHA moments over the years.  I’ve used the statement “You learn from your mistakes” (and if that is true, I am a genius - with the implication that I’ve made a lot of mistakes).  But, to learn from your mistakes, you have to “look at the printout” - what went wrong, how can I fix it?  

There are times when I decide not to fix the mistakes and let it go as a one-time mistake, but most of the time I learn.  I can’t use my kitchen scissors to cut through eight regular pages of paper.  (But, I can cut through three pages at a time if the lines are straight, and two pages for curved lines - like making Valentines).  

*****

So how does that relate to me today?  First I need to be aware of what I am doing and then get “my head in the game”.  I still do things with gusto and elan.  

And, every day I learn something.  We talk of “life-long learning” - and that is true - maybe even more so when one gets into their senior years. I’m learning that to say “LOVE WINS” is nice, but I need to live that philosophy.  I’m learning that LOVE TRANSFORMS is an ongoing process - and I have to embrace change and growth.

So - have you had AHA moments?  Do you learn something every day?  Are you expanding your comfort zone?

LOVE WINS

LOVE TRANSFORMS

KAREN ANNE WHITE, ©, MARCH 28, 2023