December 27, 2002

           Today was over before I felt like I've started, a sure sign I love what I'm doing. It was database (of course) and I thought "unto the problem". The problem with employees staying active on the payroll after they are terminated. Again it's the data collection that's at fault. The problem here is that a lot of the fees that the company pays is based on how many people they employ. The companies got five different departments tracking the same data in their own formats and for different purposes, such as insurance. The data arrives randomly from up to seven sources.
           My system is different because it tracks the movement of employees by cross-referencing a series of tables which makes it absolutely positive that you have the right John Smith, or in this case, the right Carlos Rodriguez. Six of them work for this company and none have middle initials. To the database, being terminated is just another movement.

           Thus I was assigned to produce a "Zero Hours Report". If you tried this you'd see why human resources has been waiting two years for specialized software. My database accomplished the task in 8 to 12 hours. Any employee who has zero paid hours in the past week is flagged. Zero hours is only another piece of evidence, you still need to know where everyone is and how they got there.
           The missing link was that Human Resources was trying to hit a moving target. My database uses the fact that every employee will have zero hours at every site except the one you supposed to be at. If you think is obvious, try it.

           [Author's note: the phrase "unto the problem" comes from Isaac Newton, later in his life I believe. Although I knew nothing of this man until I was in university myself, I had grasped this philosophy by the time I was eight years old. He was explaining to people that it was good enough understand and measure some things without getting into an argument of why they happened. I totally follow that.]

           [Author's note 2020: I discovered some time later the Zero Hours Report was adopted nationwide by the parent company.]