![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today is the day...
Sep. 10th, 2018 07:43 pm... I try this blogging thing again.
Every now and then, I think "that would make for a good LiveJournal entry" but I almost never do anything about it. I've been tired a lot, and depressed a lot, and at some point, I just got out of the habit. Until recently, there wasn't much to write about.
But today was the Monday-iest Monday that ever Mondayed and hell, I thought I'd give this a shot again.
It started with an email request that kind of boiled down to "...and if you could go back in time to 1998 and make them document this better, that would be awesome," which, #1, I'm good but nobody is that good, and #2, if I could, why would I want to go back to 1998 of all times? (Though a friend pointed out it was pre-Trump being a thing so there is at least one positive.)
However, because I am a solution-focused individual, I did the next best thing; I went upstairs and dug through the mountain of student files for anyone on that list from 1998, and ended up pulling about 30% of them; then went on to use statistics and probabilities to conclusively prove that students from that department in that year graduated, in fact, with a Bachelor's degree.
I presented these findings to my department head, we discussed how to word it to make it work for all concerned, and then she asked me about the status of the case from 1973, which sent me down into the records room to search for school curricula from 1973-1979 - I found literally all of them except for the department pertaining to that particular case.
I got back to my desk with a fresh cup of coffee and thought about how to present my nonfindings, to find an email asking me about records from the correspondence school for countryside teachers in the 1980s of whose existance I was previously unaware.
After staring at the screen in mute horror for a moment, I grabbed the stuff I had from the records room - mostly there to show that I'd found stuff, just not the right stuff - and the handwritten grade book for the 1973 case, and went back up to see my department head, because again, I'm good, but I'm just NOT up to dealing with an entirely heretofore unknown department of the school by myself.
My day ended up with me and the department head flailing at one another before we came up with a plan involved finding people in the building who had been there in 1973 and the 1980s (there are a few, believe it or not) and sort of sidling up to them and innocently asking "So, hey, do you remember, 38 YEARS AGO when you were taking classes in handcrafts..." and hoping all of them have steel trap memories and can tell us things.
I'm supposed to be electronizing things, but today I basically did nothing but archaeology. Oh well, I did feed all of 1990 through the scanner, now I only need to index all 500 pages of documents. Maybe I'll get to it tomorrow.
Every now and then, I think "that would make for a good LiveJournal entry" but I almost never do anything about it. I've been tired a lot, and depressed a lot, and at some point, I just got out of the habit. Until recently, there wasn't much to write about.
But today was the Monday-iest Monday that ever Mondayed and hell, I thought I'd give this a shot again.
It started with an email request that kind of boiled down to "...and if you could go back in time to 1998 and make them document this better, that would be awesome," which, #1, I'm good but nobody is that good, and #2, if I could, why would I want to go back to 1998 of all times? (Though a friend pointed out it was pre-Trump being a thing so there is at least one positive.)
However, because I am a solution-focused individual, I did the next best thing; I went upstairs and dug through the mountain of student files for anyone on that list from 1998, and ended up pulling about 30% of them; then went on to use statistics and probabilities to conclusively prove that students from that department in that year graduated, in fact, with a Bachelor's degree.
I presented these findings to my department head, we discussed how to word it to make it work for all concerned, and then she asked me about the status of the case from 1973, which sent me down into the records room to search for school curricula from 1973-1979 - I found literally all of them except for the department pertaining to that particular case.
I got back to my desk with a fresh cup of coffee and thought about how to present my nonfindings, to find an email asking me about records from the correspondence school for countryside teachers in the 1980s of whose existance I was previously unaware.
After staring at the screen in mute horror for a moment, I grabbed the stuff I had from the records room - mostly there to show that I'd found stuff, just not the right stuff - and the handwritten grade book for the 1973 case, and went back up to see my department head, because again, I'm good, but I'm just NOT up to dealing with an entirely heretofore unknown department of the school by myself.
My day ended up with me and the department head flailing at one another before we came up with a plan involved finding people in the building who had been there in 1973 and the 1980s (there are a few, believe it or not) and sort of sidling up to them and innocently asking "So, hey, do you remember, 38 YEARS AGO when you were taking classes in handcrafts..." and hoping all of them have steel trap memories and can tell us things.
I'm supposed to be electronizing things, but today I basically did nothing but archaeology. Oh well, I did feed all of 1990 through the scanner, now I only need to index all 500 pages of documents. Maybe I'll get to it tomorrow.
