Debbi Backhaus
Proposal Data Entry Centre (PDEC) operations quickly slid into a reasonably well-oiled groove after several weeks. We all honed and perfected our welcoming speeches, usually starting along the lines of ``Have you used PGA before?'' (in hopeful tones), usually followed by, (in resigned tones) ``Well in that case, the Proposal Generation Aid software operates on 3 levels, this first level contains all the observer details .......''. On particularly busy Mondays, one started having intense deja vu, or maybe deja parlé, as you lost track of who you'd told what to. We grew accustomed to the somewhat glazed look that spread across many faces as we presented our crash courses on ``How to use PGA''. We got used to the same questions each week, despite working them into our start-up talks - the ``print observation'' option in PGA probably caused the most problems, (as in, where was it?) as did selecting the print option in the gui mailer (as in, where'd it go?), and the visibility figures (what exactly do these mean?).
We had very few disasters - one user over tidied his account on the Friday afternoon and wiped out his database (luckily he'd made export copies of his proposals, so that situation was retrievable) and one user due to no fault of his own lost his database (it was recreated by PDEC staff from earlier versions and Proposal Handling (PH) analysis reports). The vast majority of users, however, entered their data, generated their PH user reports, tweaked their times, re-ran PH and went home with the job completed.
The hardware stood up to multiple users (boy do some people thump their keys down, you could hear them across the room) and the software generally coped. Occasionally it would grind to a halt on one machine leaving users either stuck inside PGA or not letting them in, or the printers would jam/refuse to start/refuse to stop - but these seldom caused long term stoppages. We came to recognise that PGA was not, and would never be, what everyone reckoned it should be - quick, gui, portable, colour, monochrome, do it all for you ....... those 14 return hits needed to get from the top of page one to the bottom, the inability to copy autumn lists to spring, the endless scrolling through the summary when editing AOT 50 out of 99, the lack of a ``print all AOTs'' option. From release to release, PGA did improve, but the guaranteed time users in particular were our trailblazers, and the later versions often contained fixes for problems they had discovered. I think PGA suffered slightly from a bad press arising from the early releases; it certainly got the job done, albeit slowly, and was very easy to use.
In summary, a lot of people came and went, most with good humour and tolerance of our shortcomings, a lot of data was entered, a lot of coffee and mineral water was consumed, reams of paper were used, endless electronic transfers of PH reports and data files were sent in and out of PDEC, and we finished on schedule.
K. Leech