Working vicariously

While I'm buzzing in and out of the office, checking email, checking flights to various locations, making related preparations to depart, I've provided occasional help to one colleague from the Combat Advisor schoolhouse at Ft Riley (soon to be Ft Polk). He has reams of Excel data, and has the unenviable task of (1) updating it to reflect reality, and (2) interpreting the data meaningfully. I pride myself on showing people how to accomplish legitimate tasks in Excel, Outlook, etc. If I can spend three minutes showing how to do something that saves you thirty minutes of work, that's a significant gain in productivity. Then, you save that thirty minutes every time you perform that task, multiplying the productivity gains for years. Process engineering -- it's quite a rush.

The task he's working on involves tracking the whereabouts of hundreds of Training Team Soldiers (as well as service members from all the other, lesser military services) scattered all over the country. Many of these people have been reassigned multiple times, usually based only on verbal orders and no documentation. Thus, he's finding people in the most unexpected places, often with strange chains of events that brought them there. I told him to look for the red striped stocking caps, because his task is a bit like Where's Waldo of Afghanistan.