Flashback a few decades: This pilot fish works for a big government agency, and there’s only one option when it comes to using a computer.

“We would run our punchcards through our mainframe’s card reader and the job would run depending on the priority assigned,” says fish. “We could choose a number of job priorities, depending on how fast we wanted the job to be executed, but the lowest — and cheapest — was Priority 1, which was supposed to run after 6 p.m. in the evening.

“Well, we discovered that for some reason the Priority 1 jobs could run as early as 1 p.m. on the day they were submitted, and at a considerable savings over higher priorities. The best part was not having to wait overnight.

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