Appreciate the Mail Clerk: Project Rework

I have a drawer full of poems that are gathering dust so I thought I would make blog posts of them. This poem was to the ladies in mail-out, who kept the data entry clerks in line back in 1992 when I worked in the Automobile Data Entry Department at the North Carolina Farm Bureau Insurance Company. Around the time this poem was written, the air was buzzing with talk of the 'new system' that would automate things. I had the pleasure of writing some workflows and helping some field offices get organized for the BIG SWITCH. Those trips were exciting and relaxing since there was one guy who insisted on doing all the driving. I landed the NCFB job after being a temporary worker for about 6 months. A job opened on the board and I applied, was hired and stayed there 8 years. I worked as a grocery clerk before that and came home one day and told my husband that I hated my job and wanted to quit, buy a typewriter, be a housewife, learn to type and get a job that I didn't have to stand all day. The typewriter was pink and white and I bought it from the girl who relieved me for my two 10 minute breaks and 30 minute lunches on 9 hour shifts. My man sure ate good those days and the house was spotless as I tried to 'earn' my keep. His job every night when he came home at 6:30 PM from dump truck driving was to time me and see if I had reached the 45-50 accurate, wpm's that the temp agency required to give you an assignment. In about a month, I was fast enough to get a temporary data entry job sitting pretty. I am so grateful to him for allowing me to do that. Perhaps that is why we're still friends after being high school sweethearts and being divorced for 15 years. I talked to him yesterday and he still calls me 'sugar babe.'After passing the INS-21, INS-22 and INS-23 exams to earn my General Certificate in Insurance, I realized that money was not a good enough motivation for me and I needed to move on to a line of work that I felt passionate about. I landed at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, North Carolina as the Administrative Assistant to the VP of Finance after being rejected by the President of the College to be his housekeeper. That's a long story... :-) I'll be sure to put it in my autobiography! [SMILE] Being one to easily feel the pain of others, I must have really needed to say I'm sorry for being extremely fat-fingered that week or something. In our bins each day would be new work and work that was returned for corrections. Maybe that is one reason that when I have a project to manage, rework is one of my biggest irritants. I am a firm believer of planning the plan, working the plan, measuring against the plan and revising the plan as needed throughout the project's life cycle(s). How can you possibly start work until we define what DONE is? It's like planning a trip with no destination.

Even though rework can be a sore subject for me, all good project plans include rework contingencies. Sometimes, rework happens not because you did the original work wrong, but when the client gets what they asked for, they realized what they should have asked for.

In those cases, the thought of doing work again does not bother me so much because I know in the end, the client will be satisfied and that's the whole point anyway right?

Well, here's the poem... Thank you ladies for being "A" team players by helping make sure that the green and white, NCFB auto policy declarations were as accurate as humanly possible!

In the process of keeping us in line,
You look at change 'one' and what did you find...
An L/P spelled F-R-D and a bill that should be PPP3.
Looked a little further just to see,
A car classed as 1A and not 1B.
With a pop of the lip and a whip of the pen,
You returned the file to correct the VIN.
When all is come back, assuming correct...
Nobody deleted the 84 Chevette!
And lo and behold at no big surprise,
Somebody spelled Hyundai without the "I"
Oh well, you say, here we go again,
The work of a mail-out clerk never ends!

--LSM
9/29/92