THE PERILS OF A BAD MEMORY
Steve Cole reports:
This morning, while doing my daily webcrawl, I came across a consumer request for another version of the FC Master Ship Chart. (He wanted one sorted by Ship Card number.) I thought "Easy" and went to do it. The file is in Excel and I just told it to sort by column #1. Not that easy. The problem is that some cards have been printed multiple times under different numbers (many of them twice, first a prototype in Communique then the final version in a product) and a few of them three times. Having three numbers in that first column means it won't sort right, even if the "real" card number is first. So, I had two choices. Set it aside and do it another time (bad idea, I'd never remember I was in the middle of doing it) and take four hours to do by hand what Excel would not do automatically (which is what I did, because I got "engaged" in the project and just could not stop).
Oh, the perils of living with the knowledge that things set aside are never found and finished. Too much work, too little memory, and letting myself get side tracked into a project that only a few customers wanted was, perhaps, a bad decision that made the "too much work" part get worse, but what the heck, it's done. I am a river to my people.
This morning, while doing my daily webcrawl, I came across a consumer request for another version of the FC Master Ship Chart. (He wanted one sorted by Ship Card number.) I thought "Easy" and went to do it. The file is in Excel and I just told it to sort by column #1. Not that easy. The problem is that some cards have been printed multiple times under different numbers (many of them twice, first a prototype in Communique then the final version in a product) and a few of them three times. Having three numbers in that first column means it won't sort right, even if the "real" card number is first. So, I had two choices. Set it aside and do it another time (bad idea, I'd never remember I was in the middle of doing it) and take four hours to do by hand what Excel would not do automatically (which is what I did, because I got "engaged" in the project and just could not stop).
Oh, the perils of living with the knowledge that things set aside are never found and finished. Too much work, too little memory, and letting myself get side tracked into a project that only a few customers wanted was, perhaps, a bad decision that made the "too much work" part get worse, but what the heck, it's done. I am a river to my people.
posted by Federation Commander at 6:00 AM
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