One problem is the tiny wasted space between the round bundles. You see that in another picture. It does not gain much, but the plan is to get each mid-square down below 3 feet per side. There are three squares. Small, medium, large. The small square are the 100s, the mid are 10,000, and the big is 1,000,000. They do not relate to today's text. I recovered the old photos originally embedded here and put them at the end.]
Yep, ya gotta get up early to beat me, and it is now 3:30 AM. (The truth is that I have gotten up every morning in my life for a trip to the head (too much information, and sometimes I read to fall back asleep. It's that reading that puts distance between me and the pack. My choice of reading can seem totally dull unless you allow that my purpose is to fall asleep, not to learn anything. After accumulating knowledge this way long enough, almost anything can become interesting, but unless you do it there is no basis for comparison.)
This blog also reminds me of how into work I was in those days. Folks, no such ethic exists en masse in America today. To many people have seen grifters and other politicians get away with things too long to believe in hard work. It’s sad.]
I was reviewing some compound interest tables (see above). Briefly, these are a set of tables that show what would happen to one dollar if it were invested in six common but different ways using compound interest. The tables contain long columns of factors that you cross-reference by interest rate and number of years, and you then multiply your actual dollar amount by this factor, saving yourself big work. Computers have made these tables tedious but at the expense of less operator understanding. At first I thought I’d found a publication that was totally wrong because the formulas did not match the explanations.
Then it hit me. There were idiots in the world back then, they were just less magnificent. The editor noticed all the formulas were multiplied by one, and being the clever city boy he felt himself to be, thought to save himself a billionth of a cent by not printing the one. Right? Anything multiplied by one is still itself, so why bother? Problem, that was the number you replaced with your actual, and anyone who read the instructions to “replace the one” would make the error of using the other “one” which is the interest offset. Result, wrong answers.
When I see something like this, I often try to duplicate the thinking of these idiots, just for a laugh. Whereas these days they only hire illiterate dropouts to proofread computer manuals and manage bank branches, the tables were once used to calculate peoples mortgage payments. So the editor thinks, “What is wrong with these mathematicians? Don’t they know their basic arithmetic? Why multiply anything by one?”
Is it still Wednesday? I got treated to the unusual event today of someone telling me how to enter payroll on a form, and a form that I originally designed at that. It was Rhonda, and I guess they feel once I left the head office, I totally forgot how to do payroll. The whole “new” system amounts to pushing data entry back onto the site level, exactly as I predicted. There have been four or five versions of the time sheet circulated in the past two weeks. (Like I said, if I’d known they would have settled for a piecemeal solution, I would have done it two years ago.) Also, Rhonda insisted we put one guys code all on one line, which was wrong in this case, but we did it to make her happy. Alas, she is also the one responsible for the horrid retrogression in the site codes to the mass confusion that went before. Even if the codes were easy to use, what she has done will cause them to sort wrong. The code 2501 can mean different things at different sites, which is wrong. The idea was to make the books comparable between sites, and Rhonda has chosen to ignore this.
Also, Julie screwed up badly. Then she screwed up again trying to call and say it was our mistake. Sorry, I log and serial number every outgoing document, and she should have not even tried to confuse the issue. There are many clever ways to avoid admitting you are wrong, but she does not seem to have learned any since she was about six years old. Imagine, trying to blame us because she forgot to do something she promised. She has also forgotten I was in the office, and thinks she is going to get away with the usual sloughing off of problems back to the field. This means even more intense records on my part, and this site will long remember how merciless and brutal her and Rhonda have been these last two weeks. They did not offer to help one bit, and refused to correct even the simplest typo errors that accompany all manual entry systems. They often called back and insisted we accommodate them in real time. Julie would not last a week in the field, and neither would Hector. Rhonda would, but that is because she could force almost anyone to do things her way.
The problem being that this site has two major payroll changes happening at once, not just their seven-version time sheet. I once tried to mention this to Julie, but she cut me off saying she did not want to even hear about it. Well, we don’t want to hear about their problems either, in that case. For the record, the major problems with the key tab system are:
• Any timeclock system is perceived by the employees as Big Brother
• the few timeclocks that exist are not near the work stations
• if one key is missed or pressed twice, the entire rest of the week is thrown off
• the clocks must be downloaded manually, and there is nobody detailed to do that
• we don’t get enough advance notice to have keys ready for new transfers
• the available reports are very poorly designed and have compound fields
• hot synching the palm pilot is measured in quarter hours, not split seconds
• the help/support line has no concept of our payroll deadlines
• incentive workers don’t understand the concept of coffee and lunch breaks
• the clocks would have to be read daily to mark attendance
Actually the list goes on. The rumor is that somebody at the Peninsula had this brilliant and new idea: a timeclock, and decided it would save the company zillions. Another example of typical Florida forward thinking. The manual clock system that doesn’t work has become an electronic clock system that doesn’t work. Such systems are never thoroughly field tested by the people who want the system, usually claiming that would be duplication of effort. They are not considering that the field people will deal with reality and depart from theory, then the first guy has to relearn what goes on – a triplication of effort.
I just talked to JZ, and refined the plan. Tomorrow, we are going to meet up at the Hallandale Denny’s at 4:00 after work. From there, a mile up to the new apartment, to unload the Caddy, show JZ the digs, and take the plates over to Daniel. From there, drive the Taurus back home in Hialeah, where I can fill it to the gills over the next few days, then drive it to Hollywood. But as soon as we park it here tomorrow, I take the plates over to El Mago, put them on the Sunbird, and drive that until I sell it or month-end arrives. Either way, there are always two cars nearby wherever I am night or day. This places a lot of faith in El Mago having the alternator fixed by 7:00 PM tomorrow. I stopped there, and it is the alternator, Manuel said it was not new. So that is the last piece of used gear on that car, it is now totally new under the hood.
I’m tired. You may have noticed the larger than usual number of hyphenated words in this journal. The reason is the grammar checker. I use it just often enough to not turn it off, but it puts that scribble under all kinds of my phrases unless I hyphenate the words. I am also reading database again after a three month break. Later, not enough interest, so I canceled the course.
