Today I'm working on database clean-up. My database and Scooby's which appeared to be about 500 records apart based on pure numbers last week, are entirely incompatible today.

He has 7,300 records I don't have. Subtracting the 3,200 records he included that I asked him to remove before he did this pull and that he did not remove, he has 4,100 records I don't have.

My database was originally created from a pull from his database. I have identified 63 records that were added to mine after that time. And yet, I have 5,800 records he doesn't have.

This makes no sense at all. It's just gibberish.

I blame the process, mostly. Bernie has been telling the client for years that this database existed, but it never really did. The client requested a pull in September, we spent two weeks (you'll remember my complaints at the time, since I was 50% overbooked with work before this project reared its ugly head) throwing everything and the kitchen sink (twice) into a database, doing a rough clean, and sending out numbers to the client.

Ever since then we've been trying to go back and clean up the mess we created. In fact, I'd estimate we've spent three times the amount of time cleaning up that it would have taken to just do the project right in the first place.

Now my job is to figure out what we really have and why my data and Scooby's data bear no relation to each other. This means going back to some of the original files we tossed into the database salad, which were in no small way contributories to the problem.

The lunatic people who had this job before me had a few quirks. For instance, I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks including the client's name or a project in a file of otherwise unidentified data might be useful. No one but me ever seems to have thought of the idea of identifying the source of data. I seem to the be only person in the world who tracks annually occurring projects by the simple expedient of creating a new folder for each new year. I seem to be the only person in history who, if she has to keep four versions of the same project, identifies how they differ so that those who follow after me have at least a 50-50 chance of picking the file they need.

Trying to figure out where the problems happened is, at this late date, just impossible. I'm going insane just trying, but it's Today's Big Project, so I'm plugging away.

And, no I didn't find the resume this weekend. I tore my room apart, sorted all the piles and papers, threw away what wasn't needed (after going through it all a second time, paper by paper, to make certain nothing important was being tossed out), organized the Papers To Be Kept, and generally tidied the living heck out of my bedroom/study. I found many strange and interesting things.

(Must contact that 401k person at that former company and see if they took my money back when I forgot to respond to that letter requesting me to roll it over....) (Must respond to Nestle and see if the offer to roll over my Ralston Purina pension money from the early 80s is still good.....) (If I'd just gather up all the bits of money owed to me by various former employers, I might be better off for retirement than I think. At least by $5k or so.)

Anyhow. My room hasn't been this neat in two years or more. I have a stack of paper eight inches high of story drafts, stories I might have finished, and stories I once thought might go somewhere interesting--all of which need to be reviewed carefully. But no resume.

I rewrote it but it's as lame as my efforts in that direction usually are. Horn-tooting isn't my forte, I'm afraid. I spend far too much time talking about what the companies I've worked for did and not enough about what I did to contribute to their success. (That last is a bit tricky anyhow, when you have to report that three of your last five employers are out of business.) (It wasn't my fault!)

I'm going to work on it more today, at intervals, and then whine at the R.C. tonight until she takes it in hand and makes me sound a little more impressive. (Personally, I think it's a triumph that I managed to reconstruct years of employment, salary ranges, supervisor names, and job titles, all from my faulty memory.)

Anyhow. I emailed her a copy of what I have so far.That way I can also download it from my Sent Mail tonight, and store it on both computers and on a CD. I'm not going through this again.

Brace yourself.

It's time for today's I Hate Yarn digression!

The ghastly cream-and-pastel-mess yarn does not, when knitted instead of being crocheted, transform itself into a poem of subtle beauty. About the best I can say is that I'm almost done with it and then I can drop it in a Goodwill box or whatever and be rid of it.

I had a chunk of funky gray-and-black leftover from that crochet scarf, so now I'm trying it with knitting to see what it looks like. (It looked good with crochet. Just idle curiosity on my part.) If I like, I'll have to go get another skein or two. I don't have anything like enough left to do another whole scarf.

I tried inventing a number of new things this weekend, mostly around ways of keeping two colors going at once when crocheting.

I had some success with a dark-light combination, working the dark yarn into what I think of as the "bottom" of the stitch and the light into the "top." I'm going to have to think about it, though. "Some" success doesn't mean I was struck into a heap by the beauty of it all.

Also, although I'm only working one yarn at a time, it got bulky. A larger size crochet hook helped but, again, I wasn't overwhelmed. I may have to work a full fifteen or twenty rows to really get the effect. Maybe it was just that the 3" x 3" sample I was making was too small for me to really make a decision.

Working the opposite, with the light into the bottom and the dark into the top was ugly. I tried alternating dark to light on bottom to top, but that was also an ugly mess. Different stitch combinations failed to provide the missing link.

Oh, well. They can't all be gems and I wasn't hired for creativity.

I was using black & white this weekend, for maximum effect, but now it occurs to me that the subtler color differences between the vivid blue and the black might make all the difference.

I can see it now. I'm going to spend all of my free time over the next week with crochet hook in hand, fifteen skeins of yarn dangling from the other arm, busily trying different combinations of unlikely things. Or, you know, I could be just about ready to give up on "creativity" and just look up how to do it online.

/end I Hate Yarn

"It's 11:40 a.m.," she said indignantly. "Why am I the only person in the office? If no one else was coming in today, shouldn't I have been informed?"

(Okay. Bernie just called to apologize for not telling me he wasn't coming in. His excuse? He came in on Friday. Considering the way he bitches about coming down in rush hour traffic, you'd think he'd have jumped at the chance to come down on Presidents' Day, when traffic is light.) (Why am I complaining? It's not like having him around improves my day. Especially when I'm wrestling with stupid databases.)