Taras Shevchenko Day

People have wondered why I observe Taras Shevchenko Day every March 9. Taras Shevchenko (March 9, 1814 - March 10, 1861) was a Ukrainian poet, artist and social activist  who became a national hero to that country. 

"But you're not of Ukrainian descent," they correctly note. If I were to take an Ancestry DNA test, I'm thinking it would show 50% English (my dad's side) with 25% Irish and 25% German (my mon's side). Here's the story of a man named Oleg:

It was March 9, 1992. I was working as a development support analyst in the IT department at Eaton's. I was responsible for the batch processing that started up near the end of the workday and continued running overnight. I would carry a pager so that I could be reached if something went wrong in the middle of the night shift. On most occasions I could solve the problem over the phone. Sometimes, however, it meant going in.

I was just about to leave for the day when I got called. The very first job in the batch run crashed. Then every job running simultaneously. I looked at the system log and saw that every time the system issued an operator command to mount a tape, the program would abort. The batch systems back then relied heavily on tape input and output, unlike the real time systems that ran during the day, which used direct access disc storage.

I figured it must be the tape management system. It was a third-party software product that replaced IBM's subsystem, which had severe limitations. I ran one of my own programs that retrieved data I had stored on tape. You had to conserve every precious byte of disc storage back then. I had just run it a couple of days before. Now it crashed. The tape management system had to be the culprit. I paged the system programming manager, whose department was responsible for supporting the software. He called from a pay phone saying he was on the way home but would head back in. Meanwhile, Oleg, a technician in the network area, happened by my desk.

"Vurkink late?" he asked in his delightful Ukrainian accent. I explained the problem and he said, "show me dump." The system dumps the contents of its storage in hexadecimal digits whenever a program crashes. At one time they had to be printed on paper, producing a stack three or more feet high. We at least had the technology by that time to route the dump onto disc where it could be viewed from a screen.

After about 15 minutes Oleg showed me a line of hexadecimal code that meant little to me. I had never mastered the technique of analyzing system dump data. "Shooting dumps" is what the bits and bytes techies called it. He pointed out a two-byte segment of machine code. "Here iss vair eet crash," he said. The line of code looked something like this.

5820 B022 5A20 B021 8B20 0001 5B20 B026 0A0D 000C

It meant nothing to me. "See the eenstruction 0A0D? 0A is machine code that pass control to supervisor. Next two hexadecimal digits can be from 0 to 255 (00 to FF in hex). 0D is hexadecimal for 13. Supervisor call code 13 mean seestem abort task immediately. Vhy iss user program doink supervisor call anyvay? That is reserved for operatink seestem."

I told him that the tape management system probably does calls to the system supervisor as it replaces IBM's code. "That must be eet," Oleg said. “Somevun poot een wronk supervisor code. Must findink out vut supervisor code tape seestem use." I paged the system program manager again. It was unknown how long it would take him to respond. Meanwhile, Oleg suggested we go to the system programming department and look at their manuals. We encountered a row of empty desks as they had all left for the day. Oleg pulled a manual from a bookcase. It was the installation manual for the tape management software. The system was called UCC-1/TMS from University Computing Company in Dallas, Texas. It was used by almost all the big iron mainframe computer installations.

Oleg pointed me to a section in the manual where it described the software's supervisor call routine. It used code 208, D0 in hexadecimal. The system programming manager had now arrived back at the office. Oleg asked him if a recent change had been made to the tape software. They had put in a patch earlier in the day, he said. It was done by one of his guys.

"Your guy dyslexic," Oleg told him. "He code 0A0D ven should be 0AD0. Instead of passink control to tape subroutine, supervisor brink whole seestem down." The manager's jaw dropped. I would have never found that in a million years. I'll bet he wouldn't have either." Change code, reboot seestem. Then should be okay."

It was now the other guy's problem. He said he was going to have a little talk with his guy the next day. It would take a good two hours to reboot the system and get everything running again. I said I was going to leave. If I didn't get paged, I would assume everything worked alright. Meanwhile, I told Oleg I owed him a drink. Or several. It was about eight pm.

We went to a restaurant and bar at 1 Dundas West called J J Mugs. My drink of choice then was scotch & soda, his vodka & tonic. And boy could he drink. We had dinner and several rounds of drinks. At around 10 pm we were ready to leave.

He said it was Taras Shevchenko Day and he was going to catch a celebration at the Ukrainian Association at Bloor and Keele. Taras Shevchenko? He told me about the Ukrainian poet and social activist who was that country's national hero. I decided to go with him.

Taras Shevchenko 1814-1861

The place was crowded to the rafters. There was music, dancing and laughter. Oleg disappeared into the crowd. I hung around for a bit. There were some announcements over the loudspeakers and cheers and applause came from the crowd. I didn't understand any of it. I figured I had better head home, sleep off my drunk and try to get to work on time in the morning.

At work the next day I filled boss in on what had happened. Good work, he told me. It was all Oleg, I said. I didn't know if anyone else would have found the problem. Oleg didn't come in to work that day.

I associated closely with Oleg after that. We had lunch on many occasions. I had never met a more brilliant software technician and I learned a lot from him. He was a really nice guy to boot. He told me my name is also a Ukrainian name; it is pronounced "Deneez." Of Greek origin. He even showed me how to write it in the Cyrillic alphabet - Дениз.

We were all laid off from Eaton's a few months later. The entire company went belly up seven years after that. With his cred Oleg probably landed another job immediately. It took me a year. I found work at Canada Revenue and moved to Ottawa where I stayed for six years.

Ever since, I celebrate Taras Shevchenko Day every March 9 and remember what a wonderful help Oleg was to me that day.