No, I am not bald yet.
There are some thin patches,
though.
About a year and a
half ago, the lab installed a fancy new program to deal with all the different
requests for testing, their progress, the results, pretty much everything. It was a difficult switch, but we got through
it alright. One of the last things we gave up doing manually was counting how
many tests of what kind we reported, and how long it took for each one, and
what the result was. Adding a line to an Excel file, diligently, every single
time one of the three senior people wrote a results report, was just a stupid
and annoying redundancy. We paid a fortune for a program that can do that for
us, at the click (or ten) of a mouse.
Personally, I was kind
of attached to my Excel file. Used to be I was the only person who did the
reports, and in my view it wasn’t much time out of my day and I could trust the
sums at the end of the month and the annual bottom line.
Then when my
colleagues came along and were also writing up reports I was glad for the help,
but the certainty that my accounts table was complete became less sure but
still close enough.
And still later, they
both objected to my wasting their time once the new tool was in place. So with
having the new system in place for the entire year of 2016, the sorting of the
beans for that year should be entirely automated, and therefore we stopped
adding lines to a table one at a time. My colleagues were pretty much on strike
anyway and the manual system was getting farther from accurate every day.
And now it is the hour
to render our accounts to the government.
Only, now I want the
details of how many relatives of patients we tested for a certain defect in a
certain gene, and how many of them had the defect or not, and how many other
tests were done in a certain context and not another. Now those details just
aren’t coming out in any coherent fashion.
So maybe me questions
aren’t properly phrased – it’s a computer program, after all, you have to ask
it things in a particular way; get all of your conditions right so that the
search in the database brings back all the good stuff, and only the good stuff.
Eh, half the good stuff
is missing, and an unknown but significant portion of the stuff here is
nonsense.
Even my computer guy
who’s the expert on the system can’t get it to tell us something reasonable. He
even called the developers, who may not really understand my questions,
fundamental as they are, and it isn’t any better.
Now the boss is
calling for his numbers, and he said last month it didn’t matter if they were
estimates, so I estimated. Only, my estimates of how many results of what kind
we reported don’t match with the estimates of how many patients we saw in each
particular context. Those numbers are someone else’s task, and I have not seen
them. Never mind that there’s a gap of a month or more between me reporting a
result and the patient having their appointment, so the numbers never match
exactly anyway. But they’re farther apart than the boss thinks is presentable.
So here I am with my
computer, wishing I had taken (and that I could have convinced my colleagues to
take) 1 minute longer for each report, just to add a line to a table. Just 1
damned minute.
For the boss, it is
just inconceivable that a computer program costing hundreds of thousands of
euros cannot simply and accurately extract this same information from its
database. Therefore, it can do so.
Only, no, it can’t.
The information I need
gathered is stored at different levels, in different boxes and categories and
technical whatnots, and Ariane simply cannot understand that –yes- I tested a
person for the family’s mutation, but –no-, she doesn’t carry it. If such
people exist they will be ignored.
What am I doing about
it? What’s my work-around?
My first approach
would be to make the computer people help me ask the right questions and prove
the boss right. But this is France, and it’s Easter soon, and all the computer
people are on vacation.*
So my second approach
is to realize that I can bring up a screen (though, alas, not an exportable
list) showing all the reports sent out in 2016. And then I can go to each
dossier and open each report, one at a time, and note on some handy table the 3
(just 3!) bits of information I need. Then, some hours later, I will be done.
Really, people.
Sometimes the slow way is the fast way.
*just while we’re on
about computer programs being so clever & all, in Word here I’m getting a
little squiggly green line telling me I should correct the “it’s” in that
sentence to “its”. Perhaps Word thinks France owns Easter?
