random thoughts – Day 1,381 – (Thursday) – time not clock

Today’s work projects included a dalliance with MS Excel Spreadsheets. It was like heaven. The question that came to my desk was about how many greeting cards (birthday, sympathy, congratulations, and thank you) were used this year, and how much we spent for printing to stock them. The companion question was about the usage and cost of the companion envelopes, customized for each geographic region in our network.

The research was easy because I save the weekly inventory reports, prepare the specs and quote requests, and handle the other steps involved including the panic when the card inventory at the literature warehouse suddenly dwindles/disappears.

The tricky part was boiling down the many nuggets of a year’s worth of info into a digestible, simple answer. I figured the high level officers asking the question didn't want a blow-by-blow account of all I know about the cards -- like how we many we ordered when, the average usage, and how the orders spiked one month and the equivalent of three months average usage suddenly went out the door in a matter of weeks. 

The best editing advice I ever overheard was early in my corporate finance career. A manger I worked for was asked a question by the CFO. There was a short answer, but the manager chose to do a massive brain dump and prepare a lengthy report. The CFO, upon receiving the overdone report, replied with, “[Manager Name], I asked what time it is, not how to build a clock.” Burn! And very good advice. And also funny because we worked for a time clock company. 

The final answer to today's initial question fell into the region of “kind of a lot.” In the process of compiling info from several sources and verifying figures, I was reminded how much fun it is to get a little data crunchy. Like the recent water in the basement situation, the data crunchy joy flowed into the after work time when I decided to back up my claim that Omaha Steaks buried me with emails leading up to Christmas.

A search in my email inbox to segregate all the Omaha Steaks emails yielded a tally of 105 emails from November 21 through today, with as many as five emails some days. Technically, there were more than 105, but I had deleted the earlier ones. It was nice to know I didn’t imagine it or exaggerate when I said they were sending a lot of emails. 

Now that Christmas is over and the Omaha Steaks emails have dwindled to a couple a day, I’m feeling a little bit neglected. It’s like they are pulling away, and any minute they’ll just disappear. Well, until next year's holiday shopping season when they want to blow up my inbox and try to pick my pockets again.