Odd Jobs That Keep The Area Humming

Terri Rydberg's official title at Marriott International is senior database analyst, which sounds vague and imprecise -- qualities that really bother her when it comes to data. Perhaps that led her colleagues to bestow upon her a more endearing title: PITA. As in, Pain In The You-fill-in-the-rest.

Rydberg says her job is to "maintain the integrity" of the Bethesda hotel chain's vast computerized reservation system, making sure there are no disruptions or failures for reservation agents, front desk attendants and guests trying to book reservations on the Internet. If the system crashes, even for a minute, the company loses money, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Her job is much more complicated than when she started at the company's reservation center in Omaha nearly 34 years ago, before the telecom boom and the tech boom and the Web boom began transforming businesses and countries. Back then, she was one of 12 reservation agents booking rooms at 20 hotels. Reservations for today, tomorrow or the next day were written on green paper. Reservations more than two days away were written on white paper. The reservations were sent to headquarters on a teletype.

Today, the company relies on a reservation system with millions of lines of computer code, which are updated weekly. Changes in the system don't reach a hotel or a reservations agent without Rydberg testing them first. In order to maintain integrity, she has to be a pain. Though largely self-taught in the world of computer arcana, she is among the last people a Marriott computer programmer wants to hear from. Because if they hear from her, she has found a problem.

Like this one: "I've known them to come up with a new command and I'll put in an extra character . . . The command should maybe be '30 JUN.' Well I put '30 JUNE,' with that extra 'e' . . . I've added just one innocent little character. Well, because I typed that extra 'e,' it took what we call a control dump, which is a more serious issue. Say I kept hitting that enter key even though it was telling me it was an error. If you get enough of them, you can bring the system down."

Rydberg continued: "Some of our programmers will say, 'Well, that's not what they are supposed to type.' Well, hello, have you never made a typing error? Or a writing error?"

The whole idea, Rydberg says, is to "break it before it hits our production system."

Rydberg, 53, works in a spacious cubicle at the Marriott Computing and Network Center in Frederick. She spends much of her day looking at a black computer screen with bright green type. Lines of letters and numbers scroll across, random gibberish to an untrained eye, but to her a problem in the making.

"This one happens to be where an agent pulled up a reservation for a hotel that we sold," she said as the data stream pointed to problems at an Omaha booking office. "We'll let them know that you need a bit of retraining . . . that this hotel is gone."

In her downtime, Rydberg will frequently look at individual hotel inventory and see if anything is amiss. The other day she noticed that a Marriott in the Midwest was booking incorrectly, making it appear that they had taken reservations for 293 rooms in a 100-room hotel. Just as she was picking up the phone to alert them of the problem, the hotel's staff was calling Marriott's computer support team to ask for help.

When she started working at Marriott, Rydberg thought it would be a temporary job, until she landed a position in public relations. Now here she is, all these years later, a relatively unnoticed but key figure in the company's growth, making sure the whole thing doesn't buckle under its weight.

"I started really enjoying it," she said, looking back on her early days.

"And then I got back into the computer area and I got into problem solving."

Which was a perfect place for her perfectionist nature.

"When an error happens and I can't immediately figure out why it happened, that drives me nuts," Rydberg said. "I just don't like unresolved issues."