The Floppy Fiasco

In the ’80s, computers were supposed to save us time. Instead, they crashed my patience.

I was the operations manager for the sales finance department at a big Atlanta bank in the early ’80s. Thirty, forty people in the department. Six of them chained to ledgers the size of a cafeteria tray, scratching numbers like monks in a cave. My job? Keep it moving.

Then the “future” showed up: one computer per department. Not per person. Per department. A monitor the size of a nightstand, a keyboard that clicked like an OLD manual typewriter, all of it wired to a mainframe that took up an entire floor in the building. That floor had its own HVAC system. Freezer cold. Oh well, I guess if times got hard, it could double as a mortuary.

Progress, they said.

The plan was simple: type the same numbers everyone else was still writing by hand, then back it up on a floppy disk. Boom—future secured.

I started with my assistant, Lila. Brilliant woman—eventually took my job. Day one: perfect. Day two: floppy’s blank. Day three: blank again. WTH? By then, hubs in Atlanta, Savannah, Macon—all having the same issue, all panicking.

The tech guys? “Bad disks.”

Oh sure. Every disk at every location is bad. And I’m the Tooth Fairy.

So, I watched. Sat with Lila all day—eight hours of her pounding that keyboard. Finally, quitting time comes. She finishes, hits the backup, ejects the disk… and then sticks it to the side of the monitor.

WITH. A. MAGNET.

I just stared. The only word I could manage was four letters, started with F, and came out of my mouth like machine-gun fire.

“Why would you do that?”

“It’s convenient,” she says. Then adds, “I told the others to do it too.”

Perfect. A whole state’s worth of backups—gone. Georgia, ladies and gentlemen. The future was already in good hands.

Meanwhile, the little plastic box labeled Disk Storage sat right there on the desk—ignored, like it had a force field around it.

That week I chain-smoked, tore out the last of my hair, and gave thanks to the god of general ledgers for my “stupid decision” to maintain the status quo of manual posting ‘til this new method proved itself.

Smack in the middle of this chaos was Mr. Casper—my mentor. Smart guy. No tolerance for bullshit. Every morning he’d wave at the computer and say, “Take a hammer to that damn thing.” Then laugh. His honest advice: “Stick it out. Believe it or not, this is your future.”

I respected him. Still do. He rarely smiled—unless we went to lunch. When we did? Mary Mac’s Tea Room. If you’ve never been, drop everything and go. I don’t care what you’re doing—jury duty, wedding, root canal—cancel it.

We always had to wait in line, but there was a bar inside. He would drink; I would babysit, and sometimes drive him back to work 3 or 4 Beefeater martinis later. That was our routine: him dishing out advice with his gin, me soaking it up with my sweet tea.

He was right about tech. He kept mocking the machine, I kept wondering if this “computer thing” really was the future—but I stuck it out. And I’ve kept up with every wave since.

So, thank you, Mr. C!

Back in the early ’80s, tech was just learning to crawl. It was the future then, it’s the future now—except now it argues, corrects your spelling, and asks if you’re a robot.

💬 If this gave you a laugh (or reminded you of the first time a computer ate your work), hit the ❤️, leave a comment, and share it with a friend who remembers floppy disks.

That’s The Condition—equal parts comedy, chaos, and nostalgia.