My programming career started when I was working at Rio Tinto’s Boron mine. They were interested in determining if there was an optimal amount of time for haul trucks to wait at their crusher before deciding to stockpile material to be rehandled. I created Monte Carlo simulations in VBA to see where the optimum queue length occurred. These simulations took in the actual distributions of the durations of the segments of their haul cycles that I had gathered from their production databases.