Excel-ent Adventures

My Dear Fellows and Dear Princess,

I don't mind my current job, but I have to say my new Project Manager gets on my nerves a little bit. She reminds me of Mavis Riley from Coronation Street in that she is VERY wittery and frets about pointless detail. I'm going to call her Mavis.

I think she's about 60. But she acts more like she's early 70's. She always wears a smock. So no, wait, I'm going to call her "Mrs. Smock".

Today I was in a meeting and she was asked what our project is called. It was a good question. The old name is now misleading for reasons I can't be bothered to explain.

SMOCK: Yes. We should change it. It should be errr... 
ME: Well the documents are all about Monitoring Infringements so...
SMOCK: Yes, you should call it... Monitoring and Reporting Breaches...
MAN: Okay...
SMOCK: ...Breaches of Regulations... Reporting Regulatory Breaches and Enforcing Standards... Monitoring Infringement Breaches Applying Standards... 2015... Standard Infringement Enforcement Breach Verification 2015...
MAN: That's a long title.
SMOCK: Oh just Infringement Monitoring 2015 then. Yes, yes, be sure to put in... have you put 2015? Monitoring Infringements 2015.
MAN: Oh THAT way around?
SMOCK: Wait. No Infringement Monitoring. 2015. Yes. That's it. No wait. 2015 should go first. I think.

Internally I was PEEING myself laughing. That poor man. He had a full page of notes to document a 3 word title.

I think I would be in a bad mood about this sort of thing if I were still at Tesco. Here I don't mind so much. This is because - by and large - I'm enjoying what I do. Mainly because it is all about spreadsheets.

When I was at Slack there was a lady who decided I was "data-minded" and said I should be fast-tracked to join her crack team of data modellers. 

Unfortunately the whole thing was torpedoed by my then Project Manager who decided that I was far too valuable to become more valuable and needed to be kept where I was, just so long as I was miserable IN HIS TEAM.

But although it is a sad boast, the lady was right. I DO love data and spreadsheets. It drives Er Indoors bonkers. I had an Emigration Spreadsheet tracking both our bank accounts and all our bills and all shoe-purchases so I could predict when we'd have enough money to emigrate. And it was REALLY accurate!

I also recently produced a spreadsheet especially for Er Indoors that calculates predicted income for the people she recruits. It has drop-down menus and validation and hyperlinks and everything. It works out foreign exchanges rates in Euro, Sterling, US dollars and Swedish Krona.

I love this stuff. I really do. As my current job is all about collating data from numerous spreadsheets into one from lots of different sources. I'm in my element wheeeeeeeeeeee!!!

It's sad but true. I listen to loads of podcasts and write VLOOKUPs all day. It's REALLY dull. I love it. 

Let us hope for another sheet day tomorrow.

S.

p.s. Today's picture is for the Princess. I thought of you as soon as I saw it.