Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough

My Papa, my mother’s father, C. J. Mortimer died in Saint John, New Brunswick in 2020. Flying through the Toronto and Montreal airports in September to his funeral was one of the surreal experiences of my life, with misting tunnels of aerosolized alcohol to kill any microbe on your skin, hair, clothes, and luggage; airport terminals with more rodent traps than people; and a hypersensitivity to everyone’s cough and sniffle that I haven’t been able to shake.

I was angry, then. I’m still angry. Angry that I couldn’t hug my grandmother. Angry that weeping itself was complicated and contagious. Angry that I couldn’t be together or near or held. Angry that I was putting my family at home at risk by even going. Angry that we didn’t hold the line on the lockdowns long enough to manage the disease properly. Angry at the whiners.

This isn’t a pandemic post, though. Well, no more than any post I’ve made since 2020. No more than any post I will make for the foreseeable.

This is a post about what my grandfather gave to me.

Y’see, I’m not the first computer nerd in the family. My Grampy, my father’s father, was and my father is a computer nerd. Grampy’s memoirs were typed into a Commodore 64. Dad is still fighting with Enterprise Java, of all things, to help his medical practice run smoothly.

And Papa? In the 60s he was offered lucrative computer positions at Irving Oil in Saint John and IBM in the US. Getting employment in the tech industry was different in those days, not leastwise because the tech industry didn’t really exist yet. You didn’t get jobs because you studied it in school, because there weren’t classes in it. You didn’t get jobs because of your experience in the field, because the most experienced you could be was the handful of years they’d been at it. You didn’t get jobs because of your knowledge of a programming language, because there were so few of them and they were all so new (and proprietary).

So what was a giant like International Business Machines to do? How could it identify in far-flung, blue-collar Atlantic Canada a candidate computer programmer? Because though the tech industry didn’t exist in a way we’d necessarily recognize, it was already hungrier for men to work in it than the local markets could supply.

In my Papa’s case, they tested his aptitude with the IBM Aptitude Test for Programmer Personnel (copyright 1964):

Again, though, how do you evaluate programmer aptitude without a common programming language? Without common idioms? Without even a common vocabulary of what “code” could mean or be?

IBM used pattern-matching questions with letters:

And pattern-matching questions with pictures:

And arithmetic reasoning questions:

And that was it. For the standardized portion of the process, at least.

Papa delivered this test to my siblings and I when I think I was in Grade 9, so about 15 years of age. Even my 2- and 4-year-younger siblings performed well, and I and my 2-year-older sibling did nearly perfectly. Apparently the public education system had adapted to turning out programming personnel of high aptitude in the forty years or so since the test had been printed.

I was gifted Papa’s aptitude test booklet, some IBM flowcharting and diagramming worksheets, and a couple example punchcards before his death. I was thrilled to be entrusted with them. I had great plans for high-quality preservation digitization. If my Brother multi-function’s flatbed scanner wouldn’t do the trick, I’d ask the local University’s library for help. Or the Internet Archive itself!

The test booklet sat on my desk for years. And then Papa died. I placed the bulletin from the funeral service next to it on my desk. They both sat on my desk for further years.

I couldn’t bring myself to start the project of digitizing and preserving these things. I just couldn’t.

Part of it was how my brain works. But I didn’t need a diagnosis to develop coping mechanisms for projects that were impossible to start. I bragged about having it to my then-coworker Mike Hoye, the sort who cared about things like this. Being uncharacteristically prideful in front of a peer, a mentor, that’d surely force me to start.

They sat on my desk for years more.

We renovated the old spare room into an office for my wife and moved her desk and all her stuff out so I could have the luxury of an office to myself. We repainted and reorganized my office.

I looked at the test booklet.

I filed it away. I forgot where. I gave up.

But then, today, I read an essay that changed things. I read Dr. Cat Hicks’ Why I Cannot Be Technical. Not only does she reference Papa’s booklet (“Am I the only person who is extremely passionate about getting their hands on a copy of things like the IBM programmer aptitude tests from the 60s?”) but what she writes and how she writes reminds me of what drew me to blogging. What I wanted to contribute to and to change in this industry of ours. The feeling of maybe being a part of a movement, not a part of a machine.

I searched and searched and found the booklet. I looked at the flatbed scanner and remembered my ideas of finding the ideal digitization. The perfect preservation.

I said “Fuck it” and put it on the ground and started taking pictures with my phone.

To hell with perfect, I needed good enough.

I don’t remember what else was involved in IBM’s test of my Papa. I don’t even know if they conducted it in Canada or flew him to the States. He probably told me. I’m sorry I don’t remember.

I don’t know why he never kept up with programming. I don’t remember him ever working, just singing beautifully in the church choir, stuttering when speaking on the telephone, playing piano in the living room. He did like tech gadgets, though. He converted all our old home movies to DVD without touching a mouse or keyboard. I should’ve asked him why he never owned a minicomputer.

I do know why he didn’t choose the IBM job, though. Sure, yes, he could stay closer to his family in Nova Scotia. Sure, he wouldn’t have to wear quite as many suits. But the real crux was the offer that Irving gave him. IBM wanted him as a cog in their machine. Another programming person to feed into their maw and… well, who knows what next. But Irving? Well, Irving _also_ wanted that, true. They needed someone to operate their business machines for payroll and accounts and stuff.

But when the day’s work was done? And all the data entry girls (because of course they were all women) were still on the clock? And there were CPU cycles available?

Irving offered to let my Papa input and organize his record collection.1

My recollection of my grandfather isn’t perfect. But perhaps it’s good enough.

:chutten

1. Another thing I have in my good enough memory is that, to have the mainframe index his 78s, Papa needed to know the longest title of all the sides in his collection. It’s a war song. And prepare your historical appreciation goggles because it’s sexist as hell in 2025. But I may never forget 1919’s “Would You Rather Be A Colonel With an Eagle on Your Shoulder or a Private With a Chicken on Your Knee?” ↩︎