JCL was the nemesis of all new programmers. The COBOL class only covered it at a very high level so we always just copied and changed names. A little background before my most embarrassing moment as a newbee. A Nine track tape included a plastic ring with a small tab on it. They were about the size of what you use in a ring toss game. When the operator removed the tape from the drive after using it as an output drive, he would remove the plastic ring to make the tape unwritable. No ringy, no writey. So, these small slightly flexible, soft, plastic rings were everywhere in the computer room because the operators just tossed them around as they demounted a tape and grabbed a new one when they mounted a tape they wanted to write on.
I was sitting at my desk one day in what was a very large open area that would eventually be used as a computer room when we needed the space but for the time being, it was the home of a bunch of trainees awaiting permanent assignment to other teams. The door slammed open and in marched the head operator and both of his arms were covered with these rings and he started tossing them at me as soon as he got through the door and his aim was pretty good. I dodged a few while I tried to figure out what I had done that had him so riled up. Turns out, my JCL had a final step which erased my old input file so the tape could be reused, except that the drive referenced wasn't the one with the old input file, it was the SysRes which is the drive on which the operating system is loaded. Brought the whole system down in a crash. It wasn't a pretty sight. But at least it was a recoverable error, they just had to rebuild the SysRes drive. We all got a good laugh and I was duly chastised for my sloppiness. Never made that mistake again.
A few years later, I met my new husband due to a similar "ire of the head operator" situation. His crime was having a loop in his code that kept writing duplicate records. Seems like the night operator just kept mounting new tapes and labeling them. I think I might have been mad at the head operator rather than Chris. Eventually the job's output filled so many tapes they took up a whole skid stacked about 5 feet high before the operator shut the job down. The head operator was so ticked off when he came in in the morning because all his scratch (junk) tapes were exhausted and he had to use new tapes until Chris released the ones he had accidently used that he had the skid delivered to my future husband's desk so it was there for everyone to see and wonder about as we all came to work that day. By the time Chris came in there was quite a crowd in his part of the floor.
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