June 20, 2014
Dear Everyone:
Where I live we have not one, but two, swimming pools.
They have been arbitrarily designated the “Upper Pool” and the
“Lower Pool”.
Topographically, there’s not much difference in the relative position of
either pool. It’s not like
you have to go significantly “uphill” or “downhill” to get to one or the
other.
They could just as easily be the “Bigger Pool” and the “Smaller Pool.”
Reminds me of when we were kids and had to distinguish between
Great-Aunt Amy and Great-Aunt Elva.
Mother would always say, “Amy is taller.”
Well, when you’re five years old, everyone is taller.
Also, unless Amy and Elva were standing right next to each other,
it was pretty difficult to determine which one was “taller” than the
other.
Getting back to the swimming pools, we could also have called them the
“Main Pool” and the “Secondary Pool”.
Or “Pool One” and “Pool Two”, although that might lead to
confusion as to which is “One” and which is “Two”.
In any case, I suspect it was the security salesman who initially
set up the new system who dubbed them “Upper” and “Lower”.
Whatever.
So we got the new security system that uses
key cards to open the gates
at the two pools. The best
thing about this new system is that it will automatically lock the gates
at 10:00 PM, when the pools officially close, and won’t open them again
until morning. The second
best thing is that it uses key cards instead of regular metal keys.
Key cards are much harder to duplicate by residents who want to
let their friends come and use the pools any time they feel like it.
But in the meantime, we have to get the key cards set up.
The first time we tried, “Manny”, the Maintenance Guy, ran into a
problem. Several weeks went
by until someone figured out the problem was that the computer being
used to set up the cards had been “upgraded” from the Microsoft browser,
Internet Explorer (IE) version 10 to version 11.
And the security company’s “web-based” system wasn’t able to
handle version 11.
This was the same problem both “Jeannie” and I had run into with our
email systems. The solution
provided by the email company:
“Downgrade” to an earlier version of IE; or download and install
some other Internet browser, like
Firefox.
In the case of the computer in the
Homeowners Association office,
located in the same Clubhouse as the “Fitness Center”, also called “the
gym”, they downgraded IE to version 10 and all was well.
So yesterday I started entering key cards into the system.
Each unit gets two cards.
Each card needs to be entered for both the “Upper Pool” and the
“Lower Pool”. At 188 units,
times two cards, times two Pools, that’s a lot of data entry.
“Manny” has a business to run.
Entering key cards is not high on his priority list.
Hence, moi.
I already had a list of all the units, from when I was trying to
communicate the changes in the mail boxes.
So it was easy to copy the list into another
Excel
spreadsheet.
And Excel has this handy little feature called “auto filling a
data series”. Enter the
first key card number of six digits.
Enter the second number.
Highlight both entries.
Move the cursor to the lower right corner of the last entry until
the cursor changes to a tiny crossbar (+).
Drag down (or across) and Excel says, “I get it.
You want to continue this series.”
Excel then auto fills the series, increasing each number as it
goes along.
In no time, I had a list of 100 key cards in numerical order, with the
address of the unit it goes to across from it.
Then I just added columns for “Upper Pool” and “Lower Pool”.
This enabled me to quickly enter the data into the system, then
check it off on the list, once for each pool.
Once the cards were entered into the system, they went into an envelope,
two cards to each envelope, one envelope for each unit.
To label the envelopes, I used a feature in Word called “Mail
Merge”. This allows you to
take a list, like the one in Excel, to create labels.
The only problem is:
Every time Microsoft upgrades Word, they change how Mail Merge works and
you have to learn it all over again.
It took a couple of hours of frustration and blind luck until I
accidentally discovered the little “button” that tells Word to move to
the next number on the list for each label.
And where did all these envelopes and labels come from?
Remember, I’m in charge of the
Petty Cash account for the
Association. Not only did I
use it to pay for the supplies, I even took the opportunity to use up a
lot of the excess change.
So, with the list, and the first box of 100 key cards, I determined that
it takes about one hour to go through a single page of the list.
There are nine pages in all.
I thought about moving the operation to my living room, where I
could use my own laptop to access the security company’s system, but
that would mean downloading something like Firefox to use instead of IE
version 11.
Sometimes it’s easier to do things the “long way” than it is to find the
“shortcut”. For instance, I
might have spent less time just typing the labels instead of fighting
with Mail Merge to get it to work.
On the other hand, Excel’s auto fill feature saved a ton of time.
As “Jeannie” would say, “Half of one, six dozen of the other.”
Love, as always,
Pete
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