I'm a mathematician by apptitude, an accountant by professional training and have strong IT links by a mixture of hobby and work. For the last year or so I've been working on developing a financial reporting system for the organisation where I work.
Today was a major milestone in this project, demonstrating it to the Chief Executive. As always seems the case in such things, the first report I showed him failed. The worst sort of failure, no error message, no clearly wrong results - just a failure to return any results at all. I can't remember whether I mentioned this before, but I always tell the truth. I'm sure a lot of people would be horrified by that and would feel that I was making unnecessarily hard work of life, but I find that (although it can lead to problems at times) it keeps things simple. The truth was given that the system detects who has logged in and what they have permission to see, this was the first time that this particular report had been run, it was also true to say that being at the peak of the organisation his report required more work than anyone else's.
He took the failure in good humour and accepted the alternative of logging in as me and running a report which gave similar results.
Even after nearly thirty-three years working for the same organisation, meetings with the Chief Executive can be quite daunting. But today's encounter gave purpose to what I've been working on and he seemed pleased by what had been achieved. I found the experience uplifting.
I was once accosted by the then Chief Executive in a MacDonalds with detailed follow-up questions from a meeting that we'd had earlier in the day. I was totally spaced-out from a very long very hard day and all my response circuits were frazzled - I couldn't summon up anything to say. After a minute or two, the CE said "Perhaps we'll talk about this tomorrow" and walked back to his exasperated wife. I think it highly unlikely that the current CE would accost me in MacDonalds, for a variety of reasons, but being a blog writer himself (for internal consumption in the organisation), there is perhaps a very small chance that he'll come across this entry. So you see, another way in which telling the truth keeps things simple.
Monday 21 April 2008
Thursday 17 April 2008
Why is nothing ever simple? (3)
Why is it that one always has a cold when everything else is conspiring against you? (Surely I don't have to say "..conspiring against one"?). This cold has lasted longer than any I can remember for years and years and this is despite taking pro-biotics, vitamin C and multivitamins. It's really dragging me down.
There are two other irritations at the moment. The first is the photographs. When my mother died, my sister laid claim to the family photographs. I didn't have a problem with this, but I felt I wanted to be able to look at them whenever I want and also I felt my grown-up nieces would like to have access (as there are many early photos of them and their mother who died 5 years ago). So I volunteered to scan them all. I had no concept of what I was letting my self in for. I'd estimate that there are somewhere between eight and ten thousand photos and I don't even want to think about the number of slides. The quantity is bad enough, but then their is the variation of shapes and sizes and different ways of fixing them into albums (including those hideous low-tack ones which have now lost their tack altogether) and the mixture of colour and black and white. A lot of the photos need dusting before scanning. All in all it's taking me about two minutes a photo to scan. My sister did at one stage ask me to send them to her and she'd scan them. I was slightly tempted but the thought of bundling up and posting them was not attractive.
There's the added pressure that my sister wants to compile a photo-book for my Aunt (Mum's sister)'s birthday next month, so I said I'd pick out relevant photos and send them on a CD. Having isolated around a hundred, my main PC broke down, it's a good quality Dell with a mirrored disk drives both of whick have broken down. Luckily the photos were on an external drive - easy, plug it into my laptop, except 3 discs of different makes later, my laptop still won't burn a CD.
The other irritation is dealing with my Mum's will. The probate office decided that because the will wasn't dated, a second affadvit was needed. I was about to take it to a local solicitor for swearing when I read it properly for the first time and realised that the solicitor who had prepared it had misworded it. So it all had to be done again. Now done and posted but anotherthing dragging me down.
Why is nothing ever simple?
There are two other irritations at the moment. The first is the photographs. When my mother died, my sister laid claim to the family photographs. I didn't have a problem with this, but I felt I wanted to be able to look at them whenever I want and also I felt my grown-up nieces would like to have access (as there are many early photos of them and their mother who died 5 years ago). So I volunteered to scan them all. I had no concept of what I was letting my self in for. I'd estimate that there are somewhere between eight and ten thousand photos and I don't even want to think about the number of slides. The quantity is bad enough, but then their is the variation of shapes and sizes and different ways of fixing them into albums (including those hideous low-tack ones which have now lost their tack altogether) and the mixture of colour and black and white. A lot of the photos need dusting before scanning. All in all it's taking me about two minutes a photo to scan. My sister did at one stage ask me to send them to her and she'd scan them. I was slightly tempted but the thought of bundling up and posting them was not attractive.
There's the added pressure that my sister wants to compile a photo-book for my Aunt (Mum's sister)'s birthday next month, so I said I'd pick out relevant photos and send them on a CD. Having isolated around a hundred, my main PC broke down, it's a good quality Dell with a mirrored disk drives both of whick have broken down. Luckily the photos were on an external drive - easy, plug it into my laptop, except 3 discs of different makes later, my laptop still won't burn a CD.
The other irritation is dealing with my Mum's will. The probate office decided that because the will wasn't dated, a second affadvit was needed. I was about to take it to a local solicitor for swearing when I read it properly for the first time and realised that the solicitor who had prepared it had misworded it. So it all had to be done again. Now done and posted but anotherthing dragging me down.
Why is nothing ever simple?
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