The NCR
I'm republishing some of my former pieces from two years ago, (with additions and emendations) because when I first started posting on this site, I had no idea that a thirty minute read would instantly put off most would be viewers. Now I've broken these over-lengthy and ignored reads into palatable segments. So if you're not one of the very few who read them two years ago, enjoy.
I’d left California once again and came back East by bus with the last of my money to a tourist town where I had family and a free place to stay.
I was broke and needed a job. My first order of business was a haircut after a year of growth. My second was the want ads. There was a position for a night auditor at a large hotel, midnight to eight. I had no idea what that involved but I took the interview and was accepted. I dressed well and my trim looks and polite conversation must have impressed the middle-aged man.
Five years of university study in liberal arts and a comprehensive knowledge of the English language and Lit allows for such fluency and ease in the face of any examination, with no need of a resume. The one strange test I was put to, at the end of this dialogue, was to solve a few impromptu multiplication questions, with simple one and two digit factors, which I easily performed in my head and answered without a pause. This seemed to delight the man and he hired me on the spot. I still had no idea what I was walking into. But on a higher level, I didn’t care.
When I was first hired, much to my surprise, I was sent to a nearby luxury hotel (the Brock) to be trained for two weeks by an expert night auditor, who’d been at that post for over forty years. He was old and dignified, soft-spoken, comfortable in his chair as if it were a throne, almost majestic, the ruler of the house after midnight, able to calmly handle all contingencies.
He seemed full of wisdom, patiently teaching me all aspects of this job, the duties involved, the sheets to be filled out, the register and till, the room cards, and the courtesy to be shown to guests. He should have been retired as he was in his seventies, in poor health and he smoked constantly. He was overweight to the point of barely being able to rise up with both arms from his rolling chair behind the counter. But he rarely had to.
The cash register, his till, cards and keys were all at hand. Guests could barely see his bald head behind the reception desk as they entered. But when they walked up all business was smoothly transacted. He completed his work at that desk and with the phone at hand he answered all queries. A night janitor, almost his age, managed and shared his coffee machine, emptied his ashtrays and did any little task that required walking.
I was transferred to a similar setup in the larger hotel (the Foxhead) the day it opened in mid-April. To complete my education they sent down an accountant from Toronto for one week. This man, in his cheap suit and tie, in his early thirties, already paunchy from his sedentary job, was discontent and clearly unhappy with his life. He was surly and short-tempered, but in his task to educate me he quickly found a close and sympathetic listener for venting his personal griefs. He was also a would-be thief, constantly scheming for some way to get ahead in this business he hated and wished to escape.
So he revealed his secret plan and all the tricks he’d developed in how to steal from any large hotel with an NCR 4600. This was the one, top of the line, infallible unit that kept track of all money transactions, with twenty categories of services, each with its own button, and able to total each one at the end of shift on a single tape. The machine was three feet wide and two high, all metal, impossible to lift, the last of the dinosaurs before the computer age.
The year was 1978.
He showed me that you could take the tape tray out, clear the subtotals, then roll the tape back in to just the right line, slide the tray back in and print out a lesser subtotal after a long column of hundreds of numbers. The difference would be yours to pocket from your till, a fantastic, steady stream of wealth which no accountant would ever find, as the machine didn’t make addition errors.
He told me there was only one hitch to this scheme, which he couldn’t solve. You turned a key to total up the columns and simultaneously release the tape tray. This moved an odometer on the machine up by one, and the day accountants kept careful track of this number, recording it on their daily reports, making sure it only went up by one each day, when tape was finalized, around seven a.m., and all the subtotals tallied, printed and automatically reset to zero. That tape was rolled up and handed over to them and another huge, blank roll reinserted and locked in for another fine day of capitalism.
My mentor taught me all he could and skulked back to Toronto, discontent as ever. I was now on my own and by two-thirty the only one there, after the restaurants and bars closed and the cashiers came down and sat in the counting room behind my post, the front desk. They did their tallies and deposited their receipts and tapes and fat envelopes of cash into a slot in the vault. The bellhops had all gone home and the lobby was deserted.
So I was left alone in pure silence, in a meditative state, sitting on my counter-high chair, the machine right in front of me, starring back, almost begging me to resolve this riddle. It was still early Spring and few tourists came in after midnight to rent a room, so I dispatched my night’s work in a few hours. What if, (I surmised a few nights later), I slipped an unfolded paper clip through the front plate of the machine and jammed the odometer?
With the slightest prying of a penknife the paperclip fit into one side of the cover and with a little, sharp hook on its end and a twist, held the wheel from motion. ‘Voila’ as they say in French, or ‘Eureka’ as Archimedes said. The odometer was placed only inches from this edge, big mistake.
Now I could change any subtotal or total where hundreds of numbers were added up, to match my numbers. A day’s tape was over twenty feet long. I filled out a balance sheet of all the money deposited by each day clerk and my own at the end of the night, and handed it and the tape over to the accountants as my shift ended and the sun rose. They checked its totals against the room slips and the money deposited. If they all matched their work was done. They never imagined that a machine, an NCR could tally up several hundred numbers and come out with a wrong subtotal.
With the first check-outs, the correct number of room cards mysteriously disappeared into my back pocket. The keys were back on the board behind me as if never rented. Only the housekeeper’s clipboard of rooms to be cleaned needed slight alterations. It was never cross-checked and lay conveniently in a drawer beside me. So all the cash from these after-midnight guests went straight into my till. I rang it up, right in front of them, but the subtotals for those floors miraculously changed.
Clever in this one trick, (which they never did catch) I was rather cavalier in all peripheral money matters. For instance, the average night auditor would balance his work maybe once a week (as they told me), because of so many numbers. Whatever his tallies were, he turned them over to a team of four accountants at eight a.m. When he most often didn’t, their job was to find the discrepancies, down to the last penny, no easy chore. They had to pour over hundreds of cards containing the charges for each service by room number, hordes of scribbled figures, and find some charge mis-recorded or not punched in, all this against the infallible NCR subtotals.
My balancing trick saved them hours of time. At first they were delighted, amazed at my work, full of praises. Ten weeks later, when I quit, there were no more compliments, only suspicious glances at me as I announced another perfect tally, depositing my armful of paperwork on the first accountant’s desk. He sat with the others in a miserable trailer in the back parking lot. The bright sun would blaze into their sad den as I opened the door.
That was their office, a narrow, ugly, tin box with four desks in a row, temporary, you’d think, but permanent for them, hot in summer, cold in winter. This was just another example of management’s treatment of all underlings. Maid, valet, janitor, desk clerk, or accountant, we were all beneath notice, treated as low as our paychecks. There were several, richly appointed, private meeting rooms, (along with a banquet room) on the main floor with fine, long, conference tables. You’d think they’d turn the smallest of these into an accounts center. But they didn’t. Those were for the guests, the rich clients, and almost always empty.
These poor, misled fools worked a boring job for a miserable salary. If they complained they were quickly replaced. The local colleges churned out hordes of accountants. I heard from one of them it was one of the lowest paid professions of all, (along with insurance brokers) with no chance of advancement. But the students signing up for such a career were never told this. They thought that a job in a suit and tie and your own desk meant money. They found out the hard way, after years wasted. The few smarter ones jumped careers in their thirties. The unlucky ones were now bogged down by mortgages, with wives and children to support, barely scraping by, resigned and chained to it.
