01:39 - 27.12.05
revelations
We watched White Christmas last night after all. I love the "Counting Your Blessings" song. I try to remember to do that and it helps a lot when I can. I checked back to some of my entires in November and decided that I had made a great deal of progress from then. Counting my blessings.
Today at work we had people waiting to vote right after we arrived. The newspaper article had done it's magic in that I had asked the reporter to write his story so it mobilized our voters to dotheir civic duty. The photo made me look as though I was tired and sick. Hated it but it is how I am these days. Some of the swelling in my face has gone down but there is still a ways for the antibiotics to go to get rid of all the infection yet.
The early part of the day was spent looking after day to day things. Ordering supplies setting up clases taking phone calls from various political entities. The interesting part of the day started at the end of the work day. A call from the head of the technology department. Now he wants to know how bad the poll key and database are. Really bad compared to what we had cleaned up last election a year and a half ago. Can I have it all fixed by tomorrow at the end of the work day. No. I can try to have the most essential tasks under control but not much more. For example, where we found one building split in half with one part being placed in one polling division and one half in another, the clean up of that little boondoggle took the best part of an evening because we had to delete the electors one by one then re-enter them with the correct polling division assigned. When I looked at the uploaded data from that effort today while talking with the head tech, it was obvious the changes had been rejected - again. Several other similar changes also were rolled back to the original status, so there is a problem that has nothing to do with us. I can't fix my database if it keeps being reverted to the original set of data each evening.
The head tech wanted permission to call all the people who had been working on the upgrades to my database. Well one is out of town, one is home and very sick, and one took the day off. No he can't talk with them. This is the fellow who last election got me on a conference call with two of his specialists and proceeded to apologize profusely to them them about boring them as he explained the simple details of the problem to the Returning Officer - me. He was insisting that I commit to complete the task of cleaning up all the mess that they made to our database by tomorrow night, but he still hasn't accepted that I do know what I am talking about - still thinks only the guys understand his comments. Why would he think I would be willing to make an impossible commitment when he can't even treat me like an equal. I called a few more people who I know have moved long ago who are still on the list at their previous address. Just checking to see if they have reregistered elsewhere or made any other changes that might hae meant their data hadn't been processed. No logical explanation for the problems there either. The database I have been given to work with is the final list from the 1997 election with mostly additions as new people moved in to certain homes. I could try going door to door asking the new residents for the history of the people who were there before them but it isn't likely that many of the new residents would be privy to that information.The one lady I called today couldn't even tell me who it was that she had sold her home to when they moved out to the country seven years ago. Oi.
The next interesting tidbit came when a memo arrived in my inbox just after I arrived home tonight. Remember my little temper tantrum the beginning of last week, because I couldn't get the notices I have to produce by statute to work in the software the headquarters had provided even after a full week of three of us working on it? At that time, when I was explaining the difficulty to the head of the geography division he had muttered under his breath something to the effect "what if this is the same case in every riding in Canada". From the memo's contents tonight I would guess was that it was the problem in every riding. The entire responsibility to produce those documents is now going to be done by a team of people assigned to each riding, but they will be located at head office. Now in actual fact it should only take one person - the Returning Officer - an hour at best to produce each document. A whole team is now required for each one. It isn't the notices that are the problem - it is all the work that precedes that with respect to entering and verifying the data that underpins those notices that take so much time. I fthe software is so compromised that that part of the exercise is impossible then there is no way to get those notices produced locally. The point I was trying to make one week ago, you see. The test that was run lst Friday must have verfied what Iwas saying which leads me back tothe phone call today.The head tech may not want to accept that I understand their software, but he is going to have to work with me anyway with respect to cleaning up the elector lists and poll keys. I wonder if he is also muttering under his breath asking if it is the same across all of Canada. I'd hazard a guess that it is. That is why the teams are now necessary. At least that is the way I read it.
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