# what i do for a living
I am a Cobol developer. i know it sounds terrible but surprisingly
it's pretty amazing. 

I was working on my computer science degree when i took a Cobol
class since it filled an elective and i figured it would be
interesting. It was a terrible experience, vowed to never do that as a
profession. For starters the class spent entirely too long on how a Cobol
program is formatted, mostly about the different divisions and what
information you put there. I am sure we did, but i don't remember
talking about working-storage a lot. The class started out using a
very old windows xp gui tool that required us to use a windows xp
virtual machine. The tool was awful, you could write perfect Cobol
and it would not compile. if you simple copied and pasted back into the
same document and it would work just fine. So that's how it went for
most of the class. We briefly covered the tools i use today such as
TSO and ISPF. I never wrote a program on the mainframe in that class.

I'm was still working on my degree when a friend reaches out and asks if
i am interested in a Cobol job. For whatever reason i agreed to pass
on my number to the recruiter. I talked to the recruiter over the phone
and they setup a meeting. Long story short a senior guy is retiring
and they want to train two replacements. in the first interview the
only question i couldn't remember was what Cobol stood for, and
i still can't. lol. after a second interview they offered me the job, tell
me we(the other trainee and I) will have to work in the basement since 
there are no available cubicals. 

When i was young my family owned a hardware store and my father would
handle the accounting and back office work on a IBM system 36 in this
building that was just big enough to house the computer and some
space for files and a few terminals. So of course my vision of
working in a basement is basically this. Working on a dumb terminal
connected to the mainframe. Have things changed. Now everything is
done on a standard windows laptop. You use a 3270 emulator that
connects to the mainframe. So that's what we did for 6 months.

He tought us about Fidelity architecture, how things were designed
and in the process we wrote their style of Cobol and a few
easytrieves. 

I have been working here for about 8 years and i really
enjoy it. Our shop is very active and we are always working on
projects. Just recently i wrote my very first EXCI which is a CICS or
online program that you link from a batch program. The program is
very simple and basically updates an online file. The alternative is
that updating a CICS file via batch would require you to close the
file first. This was deemed not an option hence writing the EXCI.