Today is Monday, November 6, 2023. This episode of Alligator, Briefly Said is an excerpt from The Alligator Wrestler’s 52-Week Devotional Guide. This would be chapter 15. I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter 15
Excel to the Rescue! (Genesis 50:15-21)
Having got myself sideways of my boss, I was moved against my will to a lateral staff position supporting sales efforts of the 500+ Service Representatives in our organization. In this way, I left a line position managing my own group of over 100, mostly Service Reps, and spent my days in a cubicle, by myself, working on the sales incentive campaign for said people. Their job was to upsell customers who called in, asking for additions or changes to their account.
Although the title and the pay remained the same, I saw it as a demotion, and so did my entire group. My replacement was remotely located 150 miles away and was only rarely able to put in an appearance with my old Wichita group. I could see that if I remained physically present among the Service Rep population, I would end up being the de facto daily go-to manager for help and advice, which would lead to even further conflict with the woman who was still my boss.
There was an unoccupied cubicle on a different floor of our office building, so to minimize the potential for difficulty I moved my work location. Out of sight, out of mind.
The new assignment required that I design a report to track and communicate sales of a particular internet service called DSL – Digital Subscriber Loop – which allowed consumer and commercial users access to higher data speeds. It was all the rage in the late 1990s.
I assumed the responsibility in the early summer and the manager who had been performing this task sent me a cardboard box stuffed full of tracking data back to January of the current year. It was all on hard copy, some reports no more than hand-written notes. From this mess, I was to construct a cohesive view of the three top sellers in the 500-strong Service Rep population and present the First-, Second- and Third-place winners at year’s end. In addition, each month I was responsible to hand out $25 gift certificates to each Service Rep for every DSL sale. The annual budget was something like $80,000.
The program was wildly popular, as each Rep had the opportunity to add a few hundred dollars each month to their income.
Where money is handed out, people will find a way to work the system. As the one who authorized the payouts, I was responsible to prevent both mistakes and cheats.
The big challenge was collecting and collating the data from 30 different first-line supervisors, who were each harried and harassed with real customer issues and had little time for a sales incentive program. Most of them had clerical support, and most of the clerical support was unsophisticated with spreadsheets. They preferred merely typing (typing???) the report and faxing (faxing???) the hardcopy to me. This, however, was a bonus compared to those who scribbled it by hand and snail-mailed it.
The impending doom – beyond assuring accuracy in the monthly payouts – was that the sales campaign would run through the last workday of the year, and the results were to be reported on the first workday of the following year. Which meant that Curtis would spend the entire holiday season buried in the report, climaxing in a very full New Year’s Day compilation of results.
No family time. Certain trouble to come on the home front.
I had been one of the early adopters of Lotus 1-2-3, pre-Windows, in 1985. My first week back in the day had been entering lists of seven-digit telephone numbers and trying not to get a negative number to show on the screen. A value like 262-1270 will forever and always equal a minus 1008. When Excel for Windows appeared, it was a giant leap forward, but I still miss the fast keyboard shortcuts available in Lotus.
With that experience behind me, I knew a spreadsheet was called for. I constructed a sales reporting template at the first-line supervisor level, allowing Service Rep names to be entered. There was a space for the quantity of DSL sales for each day of the month, and order numbers that documented the sales. This spreadsheet was parked on a shared server to which every first-line had access. I held conference calls with each supervisor and their clerks to explain the input and coach them on how to retain local backup copies in the event of data corruption.
My own master copy automatically dragged data in from the shared server and synthesized it into a single report showing up-to-date DSL sales by individual, group and overall organization. It tracked the payouts and identified duplicate entries.
At the master level, this all required many different processes to be run sequentially to massage the data into a concise and readable one-page report formatted for printing. To do this, I learned how to use Excel’s “macro” function. By the time I was done, there were something like 17 macro functions, each titled “ALT-[a]” where [a] was a single alpha letter. I assigned the titles by wrapping my way clockwise around the QWERTY keyboard.
To process the data, I would type ALT-Q, ALT-W, ALT-E and so on through ALT-D. The Pentium processor would dutifully crank away at the massive spreadsheet, and I would read a magazine for 15 minutes till it was done. Voilá! There was suddenly a completed report of DSL sales across a population of 551 Service Reps.
(During this time, my friend Clark and I, over lunch at Wendy’s, discussed the ephemeral “space-bar zero-entry” error and found a solution. The problem occurred when inexperienced clerks would mistakenly type an incorrect entry in the spreadsheet, and then attempt to correct it by editing the value and simply spacing over the number. Visually, the entry disappears, but the spreadsheet sees the space-bar entry as text and thus kills the arithmetic sum function in that field. Clark and I found the answer, three cheers for us.)
By October, every day I was working, at most, two or three hours a day, running the report seamlessly a half-dozen times and catching up on current events with feet propped on my work surface. I don’t think my boss ever caught on that I had automated the process, driven out the errors and ensured very little opportunity for unscrupulous activity.
In later assignments, the Excel experience was to become invaluable.
The holidays that year were entirely relaxing. Can you believe you can actually get paid to do this?
Theological Contemplations
When the young man named Joseph, next-to-last son of Jacob, shared his unusual dreams with his brothers and his parents, he had no idea of the hostility and resentment he would stir up. All he knew was that his quite graphic dream of their shocks of wheat bowing down to his shock of wheat was an interesting and pleasurable view of the way things would be. Telling his family was ill-advised on Joseph’s part, showing he lacked the maturity to understand that his words could significantly impact those around him.
Which is a lesson for us all.
Joseph’s brothers, predictably, hated him for it. When the opportunity presented itself, they imprisoned him in a pit in the wilderness and sold him into captivity to a migrant merchant. Joseph was immediately taken to Egypt and auctioned off to a government official who needed another slave.
Eventually, as Genesis relates, Joseph proved himself invaluable to Pharoah’s administration and found himself in a position to deliver his extended family from the depredation of starvation by moving the entire clan from Palestine to Goshen.
My abrupt move from line to staff had been intended as punishment but had unexpectedly offered a new skillset useful to my career. Joseph gave voice to this type of situation in his own case: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good…” (Genesis 50:20)
The kingdom of God is where we regularly find this sort of “coincidence.” It ought to give us pause as we consider the present trials in which we find ourselves. Some challenges are in fact insurmountable, but in God’s eyes they are invaluable to the development of our faith. The more we lean on Him day by day, the smoother our path becomes. Perhaps still steep, but smoother.
And that is as briefly said as I can say it. If you’re new here, welcome! If you are not yet a subscriber, use the button below to make that happen. Look for these posts in your inbox.
Find a copy of the new release The Alligator Wrestler’s 52-Week Devotional Guide at www.alligatorpublishing.com or wherever books are sold.
Have a good week!
Curt
Alligator, Briefly Said: Excel to the Rescue!