Miami 5 a.m., en punto. Project 21 all day. Frank, whom I reminded last Sunday to be here early, finally showed up at 3:30 p.m... We quit at 10:30. Frank has trouble with future planning, sometimes as little as 10 minutes ahead. It was an 18 hour day for me. We have boxed so far 500, 000, and are well placed for reaching 750,000 tomorrow, if all goes well and uninterrupted.
Yes, let's talk database. I dropped report on Charlie's desk late yesterday. Learning the basic programming I would love, but at my age, I need a sincere financial incentive to do so. It answered or over answered the question of where is everybody by stating, where everybody is supposed to be; a superior response to the actual problem.
[Author's note: yeah Frank knows he slow sometimes and refers to it as his “stupidity problem”. Part of Project 21 was to improve this, but the majority of his progress, while immense, has not been material to the business. Frank is never developed a sense of urgency when investing his own time and money.
Rhonda doesn't care for Charlie, and apparently neither does anyone else in the company. He is a mousy little man who is clearly jealous that he'll always be nothing better than number three. He was an original critic of the database, and understandably so, for it appears to duplicate other records already kept at a cost to his department.
During a two and half hour meeting 12 days ago, I did my best to explain the data is not the same, because his version is not normalized. He asked about my report, to which I can only say it was not a report in itself, only a sample of the type of report I could produce. Subtle.
This must've been a finicky misunderstanding on Charlie's part. I've written that I did a primary sort on employee number, and exported it to XL. Then, I added a column which subtracts the next employee number after a date sort. By deleting all the zeros I found the control breaks. After that it was simple and to get a subtotal.
Shortly after this episode, Charlie and I became unspoken enemies. He correctly surmised that my database revealed his entire career had been built around shuffling papers. But instead of allying himself with me in learning the new system, he began indulging in petty sabotage. He was let go three years later, a very serious situation for a dumb old fart like him.]
