My day

I've been told that my blogs of the last few days have lacked joie de vivre. So, being a firm believer in good customer service, I'm going to put off being an economist for a little while and instead just tell you about my typical day.

For the last few days, the winterish light is such that the glass in my front door is exceptionally transparent, so I've been awakened every morning by a bird which bangs against the door repeatedly, until I pull down the blind. But then I'm awake, so I might as well prepare for work.

This consists of a hot beverage, a shower, and reading assorted junk on the Net. If I'd stuck to the `throw it out if you haven't used it in a year' rule, the apartment would have nothing in it but the plumbing, some solid walls on which to hang the hammock, and a Net connection.

I bike to work, which is nice, since it's downhill. Lately, I've been temping for (name of well-known feminist organization), doing database stuff. The organization is in a relatively old office building in the politically hip part of town. The building is the way offices used to be done: lots of brick, and a bias toward lower costs and maximizing floor space over aesthetics. The parts of this floor outside the feminist organization office show frequent half-assed renovations, involving plywood walls with lots of small doors in them.

I have an office to myself, with two large windows, looking in on the interior courtyard of the building. The courtyard is not cleaned very often, if ever, and has assorted junk like a propane tank on its side and unused air conditioners lying around. Feminist organization is on the second floor, so I am at eye level with the bottom of the courtyard, and if I lean way forward, I can see the sky.

In the front of the building are two storefronts: a religious-right bookstore and a bikini shop.

So feminist organization is switching from an old database to a new one, but has to keep the old one up-to-date until the transfer is complete, which is where I come in. I make address changes, record contributions, et cetera into a database that's going to be obsolete in a month or two.

The especially soul-crushing part of this, beyond entering the same piece of information twice into a database that's about to be deleted and then once in another, is how much is being entered from printouts from the very database I'm entering data into, or from printouts from the Net.

I know the counterarguments, but after a day of this the idea of a gigantic national database which gets updated once and only once seems like such a wonderful idea. I have lived at over 25 addresses, so I recall how much of my life I've spent crossing out addresses on forms and writing in my new address. I wonder what it feels like to write `please remove my husband from your list, since he died last year' for the hundredth time. Some part of New York went from area code 914 to area code 845 last year, and I got to enter the change using a painstakingly annotated printout listing members in that area, which is how that area code shift probably cost this organization fifty or sixty dollars in labor.

I once had a job entering data for a pol sci professor who studied China. He gave me thick books where I could read nothing but the numbers, indicated a few things about what goes where, and sent me to do my thing. At the end of the day, I'd be so exhausted that all I could think about was going home to bed. In fact, I was so anxious to be asleep that I'd sprint most of the way so I could be alseep that much more quickly.

Getting home these days is about the same, except on a bicycle instead of on foot, and surrounded by cars. The cars, and my desire to be home, combine to put me in a bad mood. I remain polite to all pedestrians and bicyclists, but when a car violates some traffic law and starts driving directly toward me, I usually find myself giving the car the finger before grabbing the brake.

Then, having made it home, I sit down in front of the computer and see what's new on the Net.