Well, it’s nearly two weeks into the new year and a new decade. I don’t feel any different than I did on my recent birthday in December, but I’m having trouble adjusting to the new decade. How many times have you, like me, been writing the date on a check and automatically written 2-0-0-…oops, I forgot it’s supposed to be a 1-0, not an 0-something like for the last 10 years — talk about old dogs learning new tricks, ar-rrr-gh!
Will it take me ten times as long as changing a 2-0-0-8 into a 2-0-0-9 for me to change a 2-0-0-something into 2-0-1-0? Even typing this I made the same mistake, 2-0-0-…oops, backspace, 1-0. At least it’s better on a computer keyboard than in ink on a check. But I have not thrown any checks away, that would not be frugal; I just squeeze in the one before the oops so it looks like this: 2-010.
That brings me back to what my old IBM office mate of the 1970’s Ken used to say, “the bad old days”, not the “good old days”. Many of you were in diapers or not even born yet when my first job with IBM was fixing key punch machines. Do you remember the good old German-American statistician named Hollerith who lived from 1860 to 1929?
When you make an oops on a key punch, there are no easy do-overs; just get out a new card and try again!
David Robert Lambert 
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