I got kudos at work today because of all the data entry I was able to complete last night. That made me feel really nice, because I hate doing data entry. I know that it's really important, but it takes forever and my arm/fingers are always hurting me after I finish.

What do I enter? We have anywhere from 21-26 routes that go out every day. When a driver stops to pick up someone, they record the time they arrived, the mileage, and the time they depart. They also record the time they leave the garage, the mileage then, and the time they get back to the garage (and the mileage again.) All those numbers have to be entered every day for every route. So if someone picks up 25 people (a small to medium sized route) that would be 104 numbers (52 times, 52 mileages) that need to be entered for just that route, for just that day.

It takes a while. It's all right if someone has a nice, normal, uneventful run. But if they have extras (pick ups that aren't on their schedule when they leave out), they tend to scrawl them in anywhere, and sometimes don't complete all the information. With a regular schedule there are blanks to remind them to put in the times and whatnot. But for an extra, sometimes the mileages are missing. Or you can't read the scrawling. Bad handwriting is another bane of my existence. Some of the drivers have atrocious handwriting.

And sometimes the driver switches buses halfway through their route (due to breakdowns, that bus is needed on another route, etc etc). That is a horrendous headache, because if the computer sees the mileage jump from 14,378 to 201,553 between stops, it assumes that the driver detoured by way of the moon on their way down the street. (IE, a trip that should have taken 3 miles seems to have taken 187,155 miles.) Or the computer comes up with a negative mileage for the total route! (They drove backwards!) Bad. So you have to pretend that they stuck with the same bus all the way through the route, and figure the new mileage.

Quite icky. I am not good at math.

So getting a pat on the back made me feel really nice. And of course I busted butt to get even more done tonight, since I'm a glutton for praise like that.

Speaking of data, I got an email a few days ago from the editor of Morphic Tales asking for a brief bio to be put at the end of my story. An about-the-author thing.

It was the hardest thing I've ever had to write. Three to four sentences about myself. What to write? I brooded over it for a while, and finally sent back:

Sarah holds a Bachelor of Science degree in geology and works as a dispatcher for a county paratransit agency, but is considering going back to school to do something with computers. When she's not trying to decide what she wants to do when she grows up, she enjoys hiking, baseball, beer and fiddling around with her computer. She lives in Ohio with a cat (Jaws), a rat (Aurora) and six inches of sentient dust (George).

I mean, what the hell was I supposed to write? I suppose I could have written about how I got involved in furry fandom. (I was looking for information about rats and accidentally found Yerf, which at the time was hosted on rat.org and was called "The Squeaky Clean Furry Archive".) I could have written about other things I've had published. (Just a short, short story published in the Anthrocon conbook.)

I tried. But it ended up sounding really silly. Besides, everyone write about that stuff. So I decided that if it was going to sound silly, it would be silly on purpose.

Oh well.