Back when I was doing data-entry…<\/p>\n
… oh wait, you don’t know about that? I wasn’t always unemployed, you know. I had to work my way up. For a while as a teenaged uni student, I did a few afternoons a week working for a statistics organisation. I spent my time alternating between hours of mind-numbing tedium of data-entry from survey forms and short sprints of writing scripts to crunch the data, to be passed to the statisticians for analysis.<\/p>\n
The second-most challenging part of the data-entry was having to classify the jobs of the survey-takers. They would describe their job role in a few words or sentences, and I would look it up in the “Big Book O’ Jobs”. The Big Book O’ Jobs had every possible job in it, and a four digit code. For example, Baker might be 8743, and next to it would be Head Baker, 8744. I needed to find each code, and type that in.<\/p>\n
Which is fine in theory, except when the survey is of every employee at a major bakery, and I was left to read the descriptions of dozens of employee’s responsibilities and put them into one of two buckets. “Hmmm… Is this guy a Baker? Nah, he sounds like a Head Baker to me.”<\/p>\n
The most challenging part of the data-entry was keeping focussed on such a tedious task. Allow me to illustrate how desperate I got. One of the companies involved in one of the surveys was the Albion Hat & Cap Company<\/a>. Every time I saw a reference to them, I found myself saying “Albion Hat Company? Is that an Albion hat? Here’s what I think of Albion hats!<\/a>”<\/p>\n That’s how bad it got!<\/p>\n A follow-up for the Labour Statistics geeks and the sticklers for accuracy:<\/p>\n
\n