Work – 3rd March

This week I was presented with a lot of little bits to work on. Several teams had returned their green impact audit spread sheets with queries and J asked me to follow these up. G had a very minor set of figures for me to add into the database and check – he thought some of the earlier entries in a series of meter readings might have been wrong and wanted these numbers to double check. K had a set of figures that she needed calculating – information about the amounts of waste the university produces and comparisons with sector averages.

These tasks had been sent to me by email over the preceding week. I had replied to some of the shorter queries in my own time. Since I regularly check my emails I often reply quickly to queries. This generally gets a positive reception – people appreciate receiving a prompt reply, even if it only says that I will look at the problem in depth at a later date. K and J had expressed some concern that I will end up working when I am not supposed to be ‘at work’ so I have tried to keep my replies to a minimum. On the other hand K has more than once been grateful for my quick reply to a concern she has over spread sheets I have created.

I made a quick plan of the afternoon’s work in my notebook; notes make sure I can get all the work done in a sensible order. I always keep notes in a handwritten notebook, not on the computer. I think the physicality of writing the notes allows me to reason better. If I have a problem that I need to solve with logic I always result to pen and paper; digital software doesn’t let me think properly.

I had checked with J and K how they wished me to prioritise their work (G wasn’t in to check with) so I had a good idea of what order to approach things in. Having worked out a plan of action, I began work and kept going until I had finished. All the tasks were fairly simple; J’s queries were the most involved. They concerned working out the portion of an energy bill assigned to a small team within a building. An example would be the education offices in Queens. I needed to establish the floor area they occupy, and the type of work they do in that floor area. This was simple to do in most cases – a matter of looking the relevant rooms up in the university database, but some teams had listed their rooms incorrectly. These were the queries I was dealing with. My approach was generally to start by phoning the person who had submitted the completed audit and ask them which rooms they occupied. When I had the database in front of me it was easy to identify which rooms they meant and enter the information correctly.

The data entry for G went very smoothly. I entered a new set of figures onto his database, compared these to the old set and identified where the problem had occurred. I then emailed the results back to him so that he could correct the mistake (I don’t have sufficient permissions to undo that particular error). Similarly, K’s task was a matter of running some calculations on excel. I made sure that I checked my numbers and calculated them in more than one way. This makes sure that the numbers are right. An example would be the choice between multiplying a set of numbers by a constant, then summing them; this is equivalent to summing a set of numbers and then multiplying by the constant. Doing the maths in ‘both directions’ goes some way to convincing me that the excel formulae are doing what I want them to.