October 4, 2012

Banana peels and egg shells

I made a pot of chili last night. And some cornbread.  I love cornbread. I am not real fond of chili. The wife is, and I am that kind of guy. I picked out the beans and manage to eat a bowl or two. The hot air i pumped later in the evening was almost equal to 1/1000 of the hot air spouted in the debates. After about an hour I had to change the channel. I watched me some DVR'd episodes of Chopped (the best show on TV).

I managed to convince a potential customer to let me quote their widget needs. She sent me a spreadsheet of about 250 part numbers. She sent about 125 pages of chart drawings to quote from. The part numbers on the spreadsheet are NOT tied to the chart drawings, so I have about 2,000 lines to try to sort and match to part numbers. Then we have to try to interchange based on dimensions before we can quote. In case you don't know what a chart drawing is, it is a long listing of part numbers and dimensions. Think of it as a narrow listing of part after part. This means I have to go through 125 pages of part listings, sometimes 50 or more lines per page, on different drawings, to find about 250 different part numbers. Let me put it this way, it is like trying to find a certain word in your morning paper. Now do that 250 times.

I am not getting this done wasting my time blogging.

3 comments:

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

I know exactly what you are talking about.

They should be killed. On the other hand this is why they pay you the big money, right? :)

Rita said...

Do the names of the parts match? You could do a vlookup if you have at least some matching data.

Mockingbird said...

You're gonna need more cornbread for that job!

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