Kreativ Blogger

Olivia has awarded me the Kreativ Blogger award. Thank you, Olivia! The rules are:

1. Thank the person giving the award.
2. Copy the award to your blog.
3. Place a link to their blog.
4. Name seven things people don’t know about you.
5. Nominate seven other bloggers who you admire.
6. Place a link to these bloggers.
7. Leave a comment on their blog notifying them of the award.

It’s pretty hard coming up with seven things you don’t already know about me since I’ve already participated in truth or lie guessing games and other games of self revelation. Here goes nothing.

ONE

The most fun I ever had in a job was one of the times I got to build a database. I was at a mid-sized insurance company that was running an ancient DOS-based system. They were mid-conversion to a new Windows-based system on a much bigger server, etc., a project that was taking closer to five years rather than the projected two to three. In the meantime, the IT department was only allowed to spend 20% of their time on other things…like responding when you had system issues. They were absolutely not allowed to take on any new initiatives, nor permitted to spend any time or energy enhancing the dinosaur that was on its way out.

There was a business process in our department that was in dire need of automating and it was not handled by our DOS-based system. So it was being done manually with a bit of help from MS Word. With my supervisor’s permission, I built a little MS Access database to handle that business need. Oh, my goodness, I had fun. The most exciting part for me was making it absolutely dummy proof. One of the reasons this solution was needed was that this particular process was only done a few times a month and our supervisor insisted that when one came in, we should rotate who would do the next one. We tried telling her that one of us should specialize, but she was not in agreement. That meant that each of us only got one of these tasks every month or 6 weeks and we would forget how to do the process. We were forever messing them up and cursing. There were just too many ticky steps to remember.

So I built data filters into all my input fields so that the user could not possibly mess things up no matter how hard they tried. One field, for example, if you tried entering an amount over $200,000 would give you a pop-up message, “The maximum that can be converted is $200K. Please try again.” There were tricky computations that the staff used to have to do on their calculators that I got the software to calculate automatically.  The software even prompted you to load a certain kind of paper into the printer before printing the policy certificate. It also created invoices, reminder letters and policy lapse letters.

To go with this database, I created a call-intake form to ensure my coworkers remembered all the questions they needed to ask the customer while they still had the customer on the phone. I put the questions in a heirarchy so that if you got “no” to an early question, you would know to discontinue the call and not waste the customer’s time on the rest of the form. The pieces of information that could be looked up in the system later without the client on the phone were put at the bottom of the form below a line and the words END CALL, cutting the time the client had to spend on the phone with us.

That project made me so, so, so happy. I love deciding where buttons should go and how to make an interface as intuitive as possible, which reduces the chance of human error. If you design a screen right, there is zero possibility of human error. To the extent possible using the Access platform, I did succeed in designing an application that shoe-horned the user through the process with no possibility of error. (The one exception was a bug inherent to Access.)

The other thing I really like doing when I create a database is making it so that I–the creator–am dispensable after the fact. For example, I had a drop-down list where you could choose the associate responsible for keying in the data. But that list would have to be updated whenever new staff came on board. So I put a button on the database maintenance menu for updating the list of associates. And so on.

I also like to put every document associated with the process in the database so it’s one stop shopping, nothing ever gets misplaced or lost. So one button on the menu takes you to the How To manual or to an INSTRUCTIONS screen. One button allows you to print out those intake forms I talked about.

I was very proud of that baby.

Later in my employment with that company one of the VPs asked if I would be interested in going to school at night to learn ASP. Frustrated with how long the IT Dept was taking to build a website, he said, “if you were the one we had asked to do it, it would be done by now.” What a compliment.

TWO

I have a dent in my right ear that my mom says was caused by forceps.

THREE

I am allergic to penicillin, or at least I was when I was a child and was treated with that drug for a case of pneumonia. I broke out in a horrid rash all over.

FOUR

When I was a kid, I never managed to learn to do a cartwheel, though I tried.

FIVE

When I was young, I sometimes wished for an older sibling.

SIX

My favourite scent is patchouli. Although I stopped wearing fragrance several years ago out of consideration for people who are sensitive, if I catch a whiff of that essential oil in public I will often follow the person wearing it up a store aisle or down the street just to continue smelling it.

SEVEN

When I was six, an adult neighbour taught me how to catch bees. He said that bees never sting in the dark, so if you come up behind them and catch them between your cupped hands, you’ll be fine.  He told me just to be very careful to get them in the dead centre of my two cupped hands, because if I missed and the edge of my hands touched them and pressed down, they would sting. I used to get a kick out of showing off this bee-catchng talent…until the day the inevitable happened; I didn’t line up my capture properly. Ouch. My hand swelled up like a mango, and that was the end of my bee-catching adventures.

TAG, you’re it!

Like Olivia and Jane, I am not keen on selecting some bloggers over others. I think you are all creative and wonderful! But I will make some sort of effort to follow the rules, with my own twist. If you are listed below and do not like being tagged for these kinds of things, just disregard. No hard feelings at all. And if you’re NOT tagged but want to do it, by all means…grab the badge and go for it! Oh, and if you don’t have a blog, you can do it in the comments area.

• Honorary Newfie (Tom). I admire him for the way he keeps on finding ways of doing things after a brain injury, which definitely takes creativity!
• Any reader with a birthday in the summer
• AbitibiSouth (Sylvain). I admire him for his positive attitude in the face of so many life changes and transitions.
• Any reader who is on the other side of an ocean from me. Or more than one ocean!
• Bliss Fruit (Patti). I admire her for the way she tunes into beauty and peace all around her.
• Art by Serena (Serena). I admire her for being friendly.
• Any reader who loves “Talk Like a Pirate” Day

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