It was unceremonious. Who recalls the Black & Decker West Bend coffee-maker? It finally gave out after some 21 years of daily, though not quite constant, usage. This is the unit I’ve often said I would send back to the manufacturer with a letter of congratulation. In reality it went into the dumpster. Its career was remarkable.
I took it with me on many journeys, including overseas at times [but only to places like Venezuela where it is known to be impossible to get a decent cup of coffee]. It was the first piece of programmable equipment most people had ever seen, even as late as 1992 in Los Angeles. People who think California is progressive have never been there, for at that time I was also one of the few people in the state who could word process.
The glass pot, which I know has a fancy French name, was salvaged to water my house plants. The rest had to go, as I could not find a way to pry the case open. Too bad, for I got it wide enough to peer inside and see there were no loose wires. It was replaced by something called a Krup, roughly 2/3 the size. QuikDrip, that was the old model name. Furthermore, it did not require brains to program the thing, or at least in my opinion it did not.
Ah, a new name for the blog. We are reminded the original title, “The Mercy of Strangers”, was scooped, actually several times. This is the “TMOS” you see in my files going back over 20 years. These files do no good sitting here and on that theory I’ve decided on something rather unique and hard to say: “Fraught and Rife”. Just to start getting this material broadcast. It sounds like either the name of a cartoon strip or an English law firm. Intentional. I reserve the right to change that if I find anything at all with the phrase on the Internet later today.
There was no real time for breaks as I also began to deal with the book publishers accounting records. My oath, some people are total mental failures. The records had no start or end point, so my first task was to organize that. It took all day. Whoever was there before me plainly knew how to open a spreadsheet and spend a month making it look pretty. They were a miserable catastrophe in the thinking department. Believe it or not, some people think you can copy and paste an Excel formula into another [unrelated] cell and expect it to work right!
Some ten hours later, I was able to begin going back and matching up authors with books to begin updating the payment schedules. Don would meet with woe if any one of those people ever demands an accounting of his cash, and this may have already happened if I read some of the “summary” pages. I call the wrong way of doing this kind of work the “secretary mind”, the inability to grasp the big picture, no matter how simple that picture may be.
Here, I will describe the process [which] the last person failed to do correctly before they started working the computer. The operative word is “before”. For some of you, this may even be a self-test, which if you cannot pass, I’ll bet you also disagree with many other concepts presented here. That is sheer instinct for any trapped animal. Follow my logic:
one author can write many books
one book can have many authors
therefore, a linking “table” is required
See? I think that is as simple as you can get with it. Yet, the last person worked for years without reaching that same conclusion. What is required is a way to uniquely identify each book-author combination. So that you establish known start and end points. Obviously, you cannot just fill in one spreadsheet at a time and keep going, hoping that at some point every book and author will have been paid on time, although she, and I’ve been informed it was a she, spent years trying.
I found as many as four different files for some authors. Somebody got behind and tried to scramble things together, likely from some author wondering where his check had disappeared. You can imagine the mess, since there was no way of knowing if you had all of an author’s books together nor any way to tack new info onto the end of a report. Each error meant creating a new report. In case you are wondering, no, I have not cleared any of this work with Don, who is in Germany at this time. It was really brain exercise, so I’ve produced nothing that he could fire me and use himself.
This is important because some people like doing things the wrong way, with apologies to my family. It is what they are used to and they will fight tenaciously against improvement. That is partly because change also reveals how badly they adapt to new things. The premise is that if he wants me to sort things out, it will have to be my way. The days are gone when he can rely on a secretary to do it right.
My solution? Easy. While the many-to-many relationship can exist between authors and books, no author can write two books with the same ISBN number. Why not just the ISBN by itself? Then you would not know when you have completed all that author’s books for one statement. This also addresses the possibility that one author on the same list could write a book by himself and also another book in combination with another author who may, or may not be, a single author as well.. Each case is treated as a totally different account. As it should be.
Last, in the course of events, Don mentioned several times that the lady who was formerly doing his books got divorced and hauled a.., I mean, left town. Do I detect a pattern here?
