Flashback to the days when this now-longtime IT pilot fish is about to graduate from college — and, naturally, he's in serious job-search mode.

"I was working part-time in a programming job for a small consulting firm," says fish. "It looked like I'd be getting a full-time offer, but I wasn't confident of their future — I had seen some of their financials."

Which puts the company in fish's fallback spot — his "until something better comes along" option.

So he interviews with a company across town that sounds a lot more interesting. It provides banking software and computing services to small banks and credit unions, through terminals at the banks connected to the company's PDP-11 computers.

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