Tuesday March 10th, 2009

The exercise:

Jeez, 275 days in a row? That certainly snuck up on me.

In unrelated news, today's starter is: it's not as hard as it looks.

Mine:

I was asked towards the end of my shift yesterday to help one of the team leads with something he was trying to put together. I was in the middle of something at the time and promised to swing by this morning to see what I could do.

I don't want to get into specifics, but let's just say that he had a document in one form and needed it in another, properly formatted and all that good stuff. Apparently he'd had someone else working on it but that person only got about halfway through it before having to do something else. I was asked to finish the job - no rush, end of day would be fine, but take your time and make sure it's done right.

Sure thing, I'll get right on it.

After looking at what needed to be done for about ten seconds I decided to see what would happen if I copied from the first format and pasted it in the second - what's the worst that could happen, right?

Turns out? It worked just fine. I have no idea what the first guy was thinking, typing everything out manually. Maybe he had a whole lot of time to kill.

So I sat there, double and triple checking to make sure everything had transferred over properly, which it had. I messed around with it for another five or ten minutes, making it all nice and pretty, and then worked on some other stuff for a couple of hours before emailing it back to the team lead.

After all, I'd hate for him to realize just how simple it really was.

Ah, the world of business.