The Stashbuckler

When Find/Replace Bites You in the Ass

25 Jun 2008 2 Comments

by thestashbuckler in Channeling my Inner Geek, Office Games

Since Monday I have been working at a new temp job. Normally I don’t share too much about the jobs I take on, just in case someone happens to stumble across my little corner, but this job is pretty cool. I happen to be working for AMC World Headquarters for the next few weeks, in downtown Kansas City. Though the commute does leave a bit to be desired, the downtown area doesn’t. We’re in one of the highrises right near the river, and our building adjoins the Kansas City Public Library, where I can go on my lunch hour to read and enjoy!

The people so far have been very nice and the accomodations are really top notch. As I write this I’m sitting in a corner cubicle, with a sliver of a window, looking out from the 14th floor at the blue sky and the neighboring highrises. They’ve set me up at my own desk, with a dedicated computer and given me run of any number of spreadsheets and applications. Today I’ve been a super-sleuth, getting all geekily excited about using Excel (both my skills gained in grad school, and new ones they’re teaching me). And you can’t beat the perks – soda fountains and popcorn machines on every floor!

The title of the entry actually refers not to something I did, but to something one of my supervisors did. The work I’m doing today is with spreadsheets of employees, using SSN’s as identifiers. Well let’s just say that the boss did a bit of a find/replace that rendered about 300 SSN’s utterly useless. It took me a while to figure out why I was getting SO many errors between spreadsheets, but now I’m back on track and happy as a clam that I sleuthed out the problem. I know… I’ll just be over here getting my geek on….

Stay tuned tomorrow for a tribute to my new personal hero – she’s changing the grammar and typographical errors of the world one billboard/sign at a time!