(Which is what I tell M when I want to get across that mealtime or something is finished.)
I pulled out a short clerical contract job this week, going through someone’s Groupwise address book to get rid of the thousand-and-one errors caused by a rogue conversion/sync routine from her Palm Pilot. The address book was full of duplications, cross-linked entries, fragmentary entries, and the gods know what else; my guess is that I looked over two thousand entries by the time I was done.
And it wasn’t just dupe-killing I did, either. I fixed skeletal organization entries, completed address and phone info for individuals, consolidated multiple fragments, and generally made sense out of chaos. I even brushed off my old skip-tracer skills, unused for several years, and found the missing information for a bunch of entries, based on the bits and pieces that were present.
The company hired me for three days, and on Monday my supervisor told me they were expecting it might take four or longer to finish. Apparently they aren’t used to guys who put their heads down and get to work, then, because I finished at noon today, the third day. In a word, at nineteen hours on the clock I was under budget and ahead of schedule.
For a few minutes this morning it was Old Home Week in the office, as several people who knew me, or whom I knew, from my years with the City of Austin showed up. It took a couple of ’em a while to remember where they knew me from, was all.
When I finished, my supervisor told me she was pleased with the work I’d done, that the organization has need of temporary workers frequently, and would I mind if they asked for me specifically next time they needed a body? I answered I wouldn’t mind at all.
