Archives, eh
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# Data washing
The things I now know about washing customer data to remove duplicates.
- Humans are absurd. A dozen different ways to spell ‘Switzerland’ I can understand; typos are all too eay, and besides it’s small and obscure and doesn’t come up much in data entry for an Australian company. Fourteen different ways of spelling ‘Australia’? Come on, guys, now you’re just giving me the shits.
- Humans are absurd. They will write street, st, road, rd, avenue, ave, av; all these for the same short strip of domicile flanked bitumen. They will write ‘1/2 Something St’, ‘1,2 Something St’, ‘1 2 Something St’, ‘Flat 1, 2 Something Street’, ‘1’ and then ‘2 Something St’ in the second address line.
- Humans are absurd. They will give a phone monkey their full name one day, and then only an initial and surname the next, and then only a title and surname the day after that. Their wife will give ‘Mrs John Smith’ one day and ‘Mrs Mildred Smith’ the next, and yes, I am sure it isn’t just the wrong title for John.
- Humans are absurd. They’ll spend tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars building databases over months and years, databases they anticipate will bring in tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue by allowing targeted marketing to loyal customers and hot prospects alike. But they’ll balk at spending $10,000 dollars on addressing software that forces the data entry monkey to get the fucking address right. They’ll balk at spending $10,000 on data washing by specialists, instead relying on the senior developer to come up with ways. And only developer :- )
- Humans are absurd. Even when the bean counters are finally talked around to buy addressing software, they still want data washes to happen before addresses are cleaned and made uniform.
All the same, if ever I got tired of web development and database development, general coding, just maintaining the software, data entry, or even staring out the window at the trees and wondering what it must be like to be a sparow, I’ve learned a lot about data washing and I could see my way to killing myself by putting a 9mm round through the bottom of my chin into my spine and there on into the wall rather than do data washing for a living.
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# It is an exact quote
What a night.
Well, actually; what a previous twenty-four hours. Except that doesn’t roll off the large bundle of skeletal muscles on the floor of the mouth.
My net connection has been dodgy for the last ten or eleven days; basically it would drop at irregular intervals and then take a minute or so to come back. It could have been so many things; modem, router, phone line, filter, some unfriendly device vomiting radio signal all over the shop. Being a cheap bastard – almost as much as a scotsman! – I decided to believe it was Optus and it would go away. That way it wouldn’t cost me any money to replace anything. Cunning like a fox!
Forward ten days and I finally break down and start testing devices. Impossible to test unless someone is actually using the net, so I pull out the router and plug D directly into the modem and go to work. I’m thinking, if the router is the problem, this’ll fix everything except for the fact that everyone will be rooted to the modem by blue cables again. I couldn’t quite figure out which way the Universe would come down on this one. On the one hand, minor inconvenience until I spend money; on the other, the problem wouldn’t be solved.
I hadn’t factored in one minor aspect. That it would be the modem, that this – you would think – minor change in circumstances would make the modem worse, that the dropouts would come faster and faster; and D. I should have realised if this should happen that it would greatly inconvenience D, who would need to tell me about it. A lot. That this would make trying to work…challenging. I should have realised that this could happen, because if it could happen the Universe would make it happen.
Needless to say, after D made her displeasure known I sat down in front of that thing as soon as I got home and started troubleshooting like my life depended on it. Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to have made a typo in that last sentence. Somehow my fingers typed ‘like’ when of course they meant ‘because’. And there should have been an ‘absolutely’ in there as well. Possibly even a ‘fucking’.
Ended up calling tech support for the ISP, just before the Simpsons started. About ten minutes into the second episode, Bangalore picked up. Went through the usual shit like “What lights are on” and a power down of the modem. We then spent the next 75 minutes – oh, I’m not even kidding a little bit – entering my username and password into the modem and rebooting. No, nothing else. Just that. Oh no, I tell a lie, at one stage the modem absolutely shat itself and all the lights were blinking malevolently in unison. She wanted me to do a factory reset which didn’t work and then had me power down the modem. I spent the last twenty minutes in anticipation, wondering when she’d call it, if this was the moment she’d admit the modem was rooted. She didn’t; didn’t want to admit it in case I took it the wrong way and accused her of breaking it. In a way she did, but only because it was clearly on the way out and all that happened is together we pushed it over the edge.
She told me she would have to pass it on to level 2 tech support. That they would call back in four hours. I suggested that since four hours was going to be 1 in the morning that calling back in four hours would be an ill-advised venture. Privately I was already planning to take the modem out back behind the shed and sending it to modem heaven.
Cue tonight. Had D buy a new modem during the day, came home and started setting it up. One day I am going to buy a video camera and film myself trying to do anything hardwarey. It must be fucking high-fucking-larious, watching my eyes bulge, my fists shake, listening to me whimper, scream and swear at the computer, the cables, the things that are in my way, my shoes, everything. It must be! The Universe keeps fucking arranging it, putting a series of teeny tiny annoyances in my way, things that no reasonable person could get frustrated with until you get to about the tenth one at which point homicide is a distinct option.
I thought I had reached the culmination. I really did. I actually sat down on the couch and said out loud, “This is it. Nothing else can possibly go wrong, there is no conceivable option left to that bastard Universe. End of the road. I don’t know what my password was left at after the million attempts to change it, but all I have to do is call tech support again and I can get it reset.”
Oh. You would think after a life of this shit that I would have come to hold a greater respect for the ability of the Universe to fuck me around like a little bitch. And lo! here it comes a-gallop on some great black steed to knock me down and bust my fucking balls.
All I have to do is call tech support. “What’s the number? I dunno, I’ll just look it up at www.whitepages.com….oh, for fucks sake.” We don’t keep phone books. Why would we? We have the internet, we can just look it up. What’s the number for directory service? Fuck knows, I have the internet for that shit! I actually spent five minutes rocking on the floor before I remembered. Phone books! On the stoop!
Great, I have the number for tech support. Ring ring. Get through the absurd voice activated IVR. On hold. The Simpsons has just started.
Ten minutes after Futurama started, Bangalore picks up.
gilmae: “aloha, I just got a new modem and I need to get my password reste because I forget what it is.”
Phone Monkey: “Ok, first can you tell me what lights are on on your modem”
g: ”∗sigh∗ fine…”
<fifteen minutes later>
PM: “OK, now enter your username and password”
<several moments pass. FX: shattering sound, as if a fragile grip on reality and civility has just fallen to the ground and exploded into a million tiny, sharp fragments>
g: “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me!!!”
