I can haz slo(er) week?

Last week got more frantic the longer it went on.  Wednesday I matched and dispatched 37 used exchanges; Friday I dispatched forty. (For scale, handling anything over twenty exchanges is a respectable day’s work.  Anything over thirty is heavy volume.  Anything over 35 means I’m going as hard as I can go, and there’s enough workload to support me going at that speed.)  Thursday morning I mentioned to a colleague that I’d done 37 on Wednesday, and he plaintively replied, “I wish I could do that many,” so maybe I’m setting myself a higher standard than average.

Matching used exchanges is a fiddly job ’cos I have to make sure that all the components in the system I’m proposing to send out are at least the equivalent of what the customer already has.  Even something as minor as the wrong wireless card or battery can make me have to flip an exchange to new-build.  And if I get it wrong, the customer will inevitably catch it and throw it all back, and I have to do it all over.

I happen to be fast and good at matching for two reasons, neither of which I can share with other team members:  first, I have a good memory for detail and can remember things that make a good match, and second, I hacked together a tool to keep track of all the part numbers I need for the last generation or two of systems, so I can use those part numbers as filters to cut down on the number of candidate systems I have to wade through to find a match.  My team lead doesn’t like me using the tool but can’t say a lot because my results are so good. But he can say don’t spread it around or you’ll end up with something you have to maintain, and he’s right about that.  As Rick Cook said, there’s a huge difference between something an expert hacks together for his own use, and a production system with full user interface, error-checking, and documentation.  I don’t want to get myself into having to maintain a tool for everybody, so I’m okay with not sharing it around.

But really, I would like it if this week piled on a little less than last week did.