Binary Alliances

In Binary Alliances, Thomas Young writes about a World War I bureaucracy that survives full-blown to manage a 20th Century computer shop. In Columbus, DARC Chief L. T. Gray routinely denies that his actual mission is to exercise, control and preserve all the power he can, though given his actions it is difficult to imagine otherwise. Subordinates Charter Mueller, "Alpha" Bet, and Donovan Crane receive their instructions from Gray, but each displays a style, and an agenda, of his own. From Washington, powerful DASSA Headquarters boss Dick Driver and his spectacular niece, Stephanie Jennifer Carillon, defend their high ground, sometimes summoning Gray for conferences, sometimes visiting Columbus as they make their rounds. New hires like Angela Dawn O'Day and Rocky Woeller find themselves not only serving at the mercy of entrenched management but, should they resist its strictures, also under a threat of being examined and advised by Acting HRAT Counselor Rodney Cravat Earl. As new hire Richard Nibb discovers, competent work is no guarantee of acceptance, let alone promotion, but complaining is guaranteed to work against you.

Richard Nibb was tracked and paid by the hour, but his actual work, as it always had been, was identified by the job. He entered his time both ways, or rather one way and then the other, daily by the hour and every other week by the job. Everyone UNDERSTOOD this, at least the other programmers did, and for a long time even Richard seemed undisturbed.

The two reporting systems, while incompatible, were yoked in a regularly repeated cycle, the one always selectively feeding the other. In Time Accountability for Personnel Systems (TAPS) logs, programmers daily recorded the hours they spent IN THE BUILDING, not necessarily in assigned programming duties, and these hours were later used to compute their pay. Sequentially, every two weeks programmers input some of this TAPS data, along with other information coded to identify HOW the time had been spent, into CHIME (Chronological Information from Managed Employees).

Unlike TAPS, CHIME was set up to recognize that programmers did work by the job, although it assumed that programmers, like branch chiefs and their superiors, were always and equally busy, and that each programmer's CHIME-coded jobs would total, barring overtime or time taken off, 80 hours every two weeks. CHIME would take no other response for an answer, and answers were uniformly required. It was rumored that failing to submit a printed and signed CHIME report would result in suspension without pay, but this assertion was based on a misunderstanding. The data CHIME was designed to collect showed, as did no other report, not only who was assigned to what project but also who spent, over what reporting period, how much time on a project. Programmers were required to input this data since only they, of all people, knew the answers. Managers might threaten punishments, but only because they need to get information they had no other access to; since all the managed employees complied, no one was ever suspended.

In most of his DARC career, Richard Nibb made it a point not to stand out. He would volunteer, but only to accept an appointment arranged beforehand. He felt uncomfortable in being singled out for superior achievement, and he lived in dread of being noted for, or accused of, anything less. So it was no great surprise that he regularly filled out, signed, and submitted his TAPS sheets and his CHIME reports. But the signing part bothered him from the beginning of his work at DARC, and the more he affirmed the accuracy of his reports the less comfortable he became. What was he signing off on, anyway, and what would eventually become of him since he did?

He had no problem filling out the TAPS sheet accurately, since it only required him to be on the premises for 80 hou