Don Callaway dot org

Angleton, TX — 1987 to 1988

Here is what I did:

• IBM System 36 operator; prepared payroll; hardware/software support
• Wrote program to consolidate and invoice outpatient lab charges for each doctor. I found the receivables data while carrying out the morning billing run where all the previous days business is processed and merged with the master data tables. The morning billing run was about a four hour process that we ran, that is, I ran from 4 AM to 8 AM seven days a week. During those four hours there was about an hour and fifteen minuts of wait time while the different processes carried out their work. Let’s just say I became very familiar with that System 36 and everything on it while I was at ADGH.

  So I asked the business office manager about the data thinking surely it was an old backup table or something. “Oh, if the doctors don’t pay the original bill the charges move to the aging table and we don’t know how to get it out of there.”

  And I’m like, “Well, when they pay their bill it comes out automatically.”

  And she’s like, “We don’t know how to send out statements.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes but I don’t know how well I succeeded. I was only about twenty-two at the time so probably not too good. The major local hospital didn’t know how to send out statements for overdue outpatient lab charges. It is still difficult not to roll my eyes. It was like found money to them. Tens of thousands of dollars of found money.

• Installed the new hospital addition’s network cable

  About a week after I resigned from the business office for lack of opportunity and low pay, I was coming in to pick up my final check and the cable guys were laying out their cable runs in the new building. Luckily they hadn’t put but a couple of runs in the ceiling because they were doing it wrong. If I remember it correctly, they were cutting cable for a ring topology when the network utilized a star topology. Or vice-versa; it’s been a long time ago. No one at the hospital knew any better so had I not stumbled through there when I did, the whole cable installation would eventually have to be ripped out and reinstalled at considerable cost and delay.

  I knew the facilities manager was also the project manager on the construction job so I went by his office and told him his cable guys were screwing up. I took him to the business office and showed him how the computers were wired up and then showed him what they were busily putting in the ceiling wasn’t going to match up.

  He ran the cable guys off and hired me to install the cable. He paid me almost twice as much as the misers in the business office were paying me and I only saved him a fraction of the money I had found for the business manager.