All for nothing - part 2

I'd like to muse today about a totally different meaning of the title phrase. It came about yesterday when I spent my usual time at Alta California Regional Center making sure that another pair of eyes looks over the purchase of services projections. This is a task which requires one half calculation, one half inspiration, and one half explanation. I had finished the calculation and inspiration parts on the current month in question and was going over the report to provide appropriate explanation. However, there was a section that just wasn't making any sense. A particular service appeared to have cost us less for seven months than it had for the first six months of the fiscal year.

When I explained this to my boss and showed him my backup work, he was equally puzzled. A few minutes later he came back with part of the explanation and together we pieced together the rest of it. The program I had used to get my basic information had been run while the purchase database was in heavy use. Rather than wait for records that were unavailable, the program had simply skipped those records. Net result, all that I had done that day was for nothing, absolutely nothing.

When explaining the situation to a friend of mine, he nodded in sympathy. He had worked several yeares for a company in the capacity of strategic analyst. As such he would often spend weeks and weeks developing and costing out potential strategies their company might implement as well as responses to strategies that might be implemented by their competitors. It was his estimate that 99% of what he worked on was never more than hypothetical.

That gave me a whole new way to look at my experience. Yesterday was an anomaly not the usual. So maybe it wasn't all for nothing after all.