no agenda needed!

i was just thinking how i used to have to print out an agenda for meetings with my boss and write down every single thing she said and keep it until i did everything she said and still keep it after that but just file it away in case i ever needed to reference anything she said or had asked me to do and how A) that didn't do me any good anyway when $hit the fan, and B) i'll NEVER have to do that again...as long as i stay at THP with MVP. like the good book says, Count Your Blessings.

life/work balance?

i wish life were as easy to manipulate as data in excel...

• don't like that person's personality? change the color!
• want to stop being someone's friend? delete that row!
• falling in love? make it BOLD!

but...it ain't. alas.

have i no morals anymore???

oops. i forgot that i am adamantly opposed to people eating fish for lunch at work, and i just ate some. it was damn good. but now i'm "that" girl, whose cube smells like fish. gross. at least hundreds of people are sharing in my shame, as i got it from the long-lined cafe station downstairs...

on another note, what would be a good, strong verb for the phrase "adamantly opposed"? using adverbs is almost as bad as eating fish at work (i said almost!).

always learning

thanks to a colleague asking me a question about doing an access query to get rid of duplicate records, i have learned 2 new-ish tricks. well, okay. only one. but i figured out a new use for a pivot table (PIVOT!) and that counts as a trick in my book. suffice it to say, i'm still and even-more smarter than JMM.

after searching for "unique" query access, and seeing the instructions were 1000 pages long, i quickly decided this must be doable in excel. guess what? i was right. you can delete duplicate records in excel much faster. and--since his original records are in excel to begin with, who needs access???

trick #1 - select all the columns and rows in your data range, go to your data menu and use the Advanced Filter to only copy Unique Records (shows up as a checkbox on the Advanced Filter window). now, these instructions are easily downloadable from many excel-help websites and i read them over and over again...apparently, i am the only geeky excel user who DIDN'T know how to do this. (but, then again, i have never had a reason to do this). however...i kept doing them over and over and wasn't getting any results so i started to think that a) they didn't work (because, of course, i'm Not Stupid) and b) anyone who read the instructions and thought they worked was stupid. well, i was wrong on both counts. the reason it wasn't working for me is because you have to have an exact duplicate, like the entire row has to match another entire row. whereas, my data was only duplicated in specific columns, namely the first 3. so...to make a long point even more boring, what i did was shortened my data range--you have to do this manually because even if you only select a few columns in your data range, excel changes it to all the columns because excel thinks i'm stupid, too--and THEN used the advanced filter to get rid of duplicates. this gave me a count of the rows in which there were duplicates in the first 3 columns.

okay, trick #2. create a pivot table with only the columns you need, like Member #, Date, & Diagnosis Code and change your sum function to a count function; that requires excel to group any duplicate member #s and give you a count of how many dates and diagnosis they have. you can easily "count" the number of members by seeing how many rows it takes up on your new pivot-table-tab. this is actually much quicker (i think) and a lot more fun!! i love pivot tables!!! i want to be buried with a pivot table. is that possible???

sweaty pits and i can't even drink about it

you know it's gonna be a bad day when you get to work, walk up the 5 flights of stairs that still aren't getting any easier, and realize you forgot to put on deodorant this morning. unfortunately, the only kind i have at my desk is the "natural" deodorant, which i should have just thrown away when i realized it didn't work...

if that isn't bad enough, i recently discovered that my work has a "no tolerance" policy for alcohol on the premises. great! what am i going to do with the flask and mini martini shaker i've been keeping at my desk???

not quite a tempered radical, but close.

despite the signs posted everywhere saying you can't leave your food in the microwave and then walk away to do something else, i just put my food in the microwave, walked away and went to the bathroom, then walked back and it was still there and nothing had blown up. i feel very "i've been her long enough to disregard that rule" right now.

and, yes, i'm eating at 11 AM. i can't help it. i'm starving.