June 13, 1990
Dear Everyone:
“A meeting is an event at which the minutes are
kept and the hours are lost.”
“Alma” saw this in someone’s office last week; and
she was so taken with it that she copied it and passed it around at the
meeting she had called for first thing Monday morning.
It’s not true, of course.
We hardly ever take minutes.
And in this instance, we didn’t waste that many hours, primarily
because “Carla” had booked the room in advance and we had to be out by
9:30.
I was in “BUSinessplus” classes all last week.
Before leaving work the Friday before classes, I took care (and
an extra hour after work) to clear my desk off completely, placing
things in files and tucking small items into drawers which I then
locked, except for the file cabinet which has to be accessible to others
in the department. This way,
I knew that everything that was on my desk Monday morning was new work.
If you don’t do this, new work lands on top of old work
and, without supervision, it tends to get horribly mixed up.
Fortunately, it only took me until this morning to
dig my way through the new work and now I can get back to what I wasn’t
doing before I left for class.
Except for one thing:
While I was off in class, “Jane” was busily indexing the Retrieval
requests into the wrong file.
If I had been around, I might have caught it sooner.
As it was, I spotted it Monday morning.
When I showed her the error of her ways, “Jane” said, brightly:
“Oh, well, we can just do a Global Change!”
Easy for her to say since “Kevin” and I are the
only ones authorized to do Globals and I’m the only one with a book that
theoretically tells me how to do it.
As for “Kevin”, I haven’t seen him since Monday.
I think he’s hiding in the bushes until I get this thing figured
out. Global changes are just
what they sound like:
tricky. It’s easy to change
the wrong thing. I think
I’ll try a few in the DEMO1 (pretend) database before I do anything in
our (real) database.
Two good things about those classes last week.
Number One: I got to
sleep an extra hour and have
breakfast every morning.
Number Two: Even though
Release L (“BUSinessplus”) is different from Release K (the one we’re
using now), it did help me to understand how “BUSiness” thinks.
Just remember, computers do whatever you tell them to do whether
you want them to or not.
For instance, I learned a new WordPerfect trick
this week: Select.
This lets you pick a particular field, such as the Records
Coordinator Code, in a column-type document (such as CRMDATS) and print
only the ones you want.
So when “Alma” asked me for a list of all the Destruction
Approval batches that went to “Danny Olson” (Records Coordinator Code
10), I called up the CRMDATS file (Company Records Management
Destruction Approval Tracking System) and did a
select where field 3 equals 10 and presto!
WordPerfect took a document that was 18 pages long and chopped it
down to three and a half pages (kids! don’t try this at home!) of only
“Danny’s” batches.
However,
if you forget to go back in and remove that select, WordPerfect won’t
let you sort the new file.
It keeps looking at that field 3.
Even WordPerfect isn’t perfect.
It’s my week to drive the company van pool into the
City each morning and homeward each afternoon.
One thing about driving the Big Blue Brute at this time of year:
At least you can see the other cars because it’s light out at
6:00. Of course, this
doesn’t mean that I’m any better at changing lanes than I was last
winter. My advice is, if you
see a big, blue van, steer clear of it.
"Jeannie" and I got together last weekend, fed half a
loaf of bread to the ducks (lots of babies!) and went to see
Total Recall.
Skip it, unless you really like that big guy who married Maria
Shriver. You’re better off
going to see
Back to the Future, Part
III and count how many Michael J. Foxes you can see.
Love, as always,
Pete
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