OddThinking

Back when I was doing data-entry…

… oh wait, you don’t know about that? I wasn’t always unemployed, you know. I had to work my way up. For a while as a teenaged uni student, I did a few afternoons a week working for a statistics organisation. I spent my time alternating between hours of mind-numbing tedium of data-entry from survey forms and short sprints of writing scripts to crunch the data, to be passed to the statisticians for analysis.

The second-most challenging part of the data-entry was having to classify the jobs of the survey-takers. They would describe their job role in a few words or sentences, and I would look it up in the “Big Book O’ Jobs”. The Big Book O’ Jobs had every possible job in it, and a four digit code. For example, Baker might be 8743, and next to it would be Head Baker, 8744. I needed to find each code, and type that in.

Which is fine in theory, except when the survey is of every employee at a major bakery, and I was left to read the descriptions of dozens of employee’s responsibilities and put them into one of two buckets. “Hmmm… Is this guy a Baker? Nah, he sounds like a Head Baker to me.”

The most challenging part of the data-entry was keeping focussed on such a tedious task. Allow me to illustrate how desperate I got. One of the companies involved in one of the surveys was the Albion Hat & Cap Company. Every time I saw a reference to them, I found myself saying “Albion Hat Company? Is that an Albion hat? Here’s what I think of Albion hats!”

That’s how bad it got!

A follow-up for the Labour Statistics geeks and the sticklers for accuracy:

I don’t know if it is derived from the same source, but the concept of the Big Book O’ Jobs still exists. It’s now called ANZCO (Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupation).

I found Baker (351111, Prepares and bakes bread loaves and rolls) and Pastry Cook (351112, Prepares and bakes buns, cakes, biscuits and pastry goods), but no Head Baker.