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I worked my first full(ish) day of the year on Friday. Not horrible.
It's a good thing that Lambert House didn't have their data entry done until late last week, because I sure as hell wasn't ready for it until the weekend. So I bopped on down to the house — I can't work remotely because their remote access software is old — and failed to get into the usual office, whose lock has been janky for years. Luckily, somebody did the admin chores needed to allow me to use a machine elsewhere.
Next frustration: spending an hour resolving the 1% or so of data marked as duplicate entries, which mess up our reports to a degree that director Ken Shulman finds unacceptable*. I don't know how this happens so often, but nothing is foolproof.
Next frustration after that: finding the queries I need to run. This is where Microsoft Access makes me want to yell. Queries with UNION operators are elsewhere in the UI? Really?
But I got (most of**) the job done, so with numb toes from the lack of heat in the empty house I walked to dinner with the felicitously nearby Funny Lady. Bar Vacilando does have a good burger, as she promised, and I had a lovely time with glögg. But I was still coughing enough during dinner that I bailed on any further attempts at fun that evening. Look at me being sensible!
*What about the local government agencies that require us to make the reports? Historically, sometimes they read the reports and care about their accuracy, sometimes they don't. But Ken's right that we shouldn't take it for granted that they don't.
**Ken likes to do deep dives into the ZIP code breakdown. It looked like the kind of thing I shouldn't do alone. Indeed, in pre-COVID times Ken & I spent several nights working until 0200 on exactly this. Ungh.
It's a good thing that Lambert House didn't have their data entry done until late last week, because I sure as hell wasn't ready for it until the weekend. So I bopped on down to the house — I can't work remotely because their remote access software is old — and failed to get into the usual office, whose lock has been janky for years. Luckily, somebody did the admin chores needed to allow me to use a machine elsewhere.
Next frustration: spending an hour resolving the 1% or so of data marked as duplicate entries, which mess up our reports to a degree that director Ken Shulman finds unacceptable*. I don't know how this happens so often, but nothing is foolproof.
Next frustration after that: finding the queries I need to run. This is where Microsoft Access makes me want to yell. Queries with UNION operators are elsewhere in the UI? Really?
But I got (most of**) the job done, so with numb toes from the lack of heat in the empty house I walked to dinner with the felicitously nearby Funny Lady. Bar Vacilando does have a good burger, as she promised, and I had a lovely time with glögg. But I was still coughing enough during dinner that I bailed on any further attempts at fun that evening. Look at me being sensible!
*What about the local government agencies that require us to make the reports? Historically, sometimes they read the reports and care about their accuracy, sometimes they don't. But Ken's right that we shouldn't take it for granted that they don't.
**Ken likes to do deep dives into the ZIP code breakdown. It looked like the kind of thing I shouldn't do alone. Indeed, in pre-COVID times Ken & I spent several nights working until 0200 on exactly this. Ungh.
