Imagine you are told that the database you work with and need to function at your job, the database that has about 32,000 items in it, was lost during a server move.

Imagine you actually started crying in front of the IT guy after calculating in your head that it would probably take you at least six years to re-create it from scratch (an optimistic estimate).

Imagine you are later told that there actually is a backup, but it is from just over 2 1/2 years ago which means it is from about 2 months before you started working at your job.

Imagine that in the 2 1/2 years that you worked at your job you had weeded out about 10,000 items from your collection that had been redundant, outdated, in bad condition, or otherwise no longer needed and had added about 2,000 brand-new items.

Imagine that this backup, which is the best IT can do for you, now reflects the the items that were in the database before the major overhaul that you did (working your butt off and practically cloning yourself because you wanted to have the best library ever), so that there is now a 12,000 item discrepancy in your database.

Imagine that the students in your database are now students from 2007 so that the kids who actually are seniors now are freshmen in your database and the rest of the kids don’t exist, while the bulk of your database is students who have long since left the building.

Imagine that your database shows the books that were checked out in 2007 as being checked out now (and all obviously very overdue) while all the books that are currently checked out are either marked as being in or do not even yet exist in your database.

Imagine that the best you can do now is do a full-scale inventory of every single item (did I mention there are 32,000 of them), run reports to see which items come up as not inventoried, and then hand-delete those items out of the database.

imagine you are going through the five stages of grief but acceptance is still a ways off and you’re sort of stuck at the phase where you just bang your head against the desk.

Welcome to my world.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 10:58 pm and is filed under work wierdos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.