>>The absolute worst error you could make was to forget to put the rubber band around the deck of cards before you left to submit them to the card reader. It was a forgone conclusion you would trip and scatter the entire deck and spend hours re-sortting.
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>Yup --- a rather unpleasant situation. Only made worse if you neglected to put sequence numbers on the deck (otherwise it's not too big of a hassle if you had access to a card sorter -- pretty nifty device to see in action).

My first summer job as a college student was in a downtown NYC office of a Department of Defense agency working in the computer room. I got to operate the card sorter, burster, and decollater. The sorter was kind of cool but the burster and decollater were major pains because they would keep jamming.

Small world story..... One of the section chiefs (not in my department) was an army major who, five years later, was the Asst G-4 when I was assigned to division G-4 as a clerk. He left a month or so later (got his promotion to LtCol) but he remembered me from those bygone days.