Saturday, April 11, 2009

An Explanation is Requested

Yesterday I related a tale of being abused as I was trying to find the spelling for a word that was eluding my sleep-deprived brain.

Why did I need the word "Legibly" at 6:15 in the morning?
Because I have a daily "Things To Remember" list that we cover with the Volunteers.

Why did I need *that* word?



We gather results electronically, but as we have learned through years of painful Darwinian selection, a manual backup is mandatory.
(You always have to have a manual backup, no matter how bulletproof your Technology is.)
In this case, the manual backup gives us a reference to check our electronic results.

But... Sometimes the process breaks down. And therein lies the story.
Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to Thursday evening...
As I was Quality Checking our results, reconciling the results to our backup paper logs, I came across a set of results that made no sense at all.
No matter how long I looked at it, and no matter how hard I studied it, I couldn't make sense of the results.

"Ah!" I said to myself "I shall take advantage of our finely-honed backup system... I'll look at the paper logs of the results. No doubt our fine volunteers followed our instructions carefully, keeping a duplicate set of results and notes on any deviations form the norm."

I looked up the logs for that location, then flipped to the results in question...expecting to see an entry like "Hit Tree", "Off Grid", "Provisional" or some such notation.

"Hmmmm." I mused. "Hey Susan...Can you read this."
"Hmmm." She said. "I think is says 'Polar bear in bistro with mom'."
"Yeah... I got 'Molar bearing pepto wombat'."

Yeah... I guess a reminder to our guys is in order...
Hence the need for a spell check.
It's bad form to have misspellings in memos about accuracy in reporting, don't you think?


TBG- ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE

1 comment:

Bug said...

MS has this thing called Word, which has a spell check built-in. It conveniently does not require Internet access to work. If Word is not available, Outlook will also work nicely.

btw, you might want to try "legibly" writing on your whiteboard when you're trying to be so thorough.