Right, so seeing “2000 5” just brought back some old stuff. Not exactly fun times, but hey, it happened. Takes me way back, maybe around the year 2000, give or take. I was pretty green back then, just trying to get by.
The Grind
There was this project, a real beast. We had this massive data migration thing. And guess what? A huge chunk of it had to be checked manually. My task? Verify exactly 2000 records. Sounds simple, right? Just check 2000 entries.
But here’s the kicker, the “5” part. For each record, there were like 5 specific fields or conditions that needed manual cross-referencing. We didn’t have fancy automated tools back then, not for this specific mess anyway. It was all eyeballs on screen, comparing data from some old system printouts to the new database entries shown on a clunky CRT monitor.
The Process, Oh God, The Process
So, what did I actually do?
- I grabbed a stack of printouts. Thick, dusty things.
- I logged into the terminal. Green text on black background, classic.
- I pulled up the first record ID from the printout.
- I typed it into the database query tool. Waited for it to load.
- Then I checked the 5 key things. Name matched? Check. Address roughly the same? Check. Some specific code correct? Check. Date within range? Check. Status flag set right? Check.
- If everything looked okay, I marked it off on the printout with a pen.
- If something was wrong, I had to write down the ID and the specific issue on a separate ‘error log’ sheet.
Repeat that 2000 times. It was mind-numbing. My eyes hurt, my back ached from sitting in that crappy chair. Coffee consumption went through the roof. Days blurred together. Just endless checking, marking, typing.
Why Me?
Funny thing is, I ended up with this task because the senior guy who was supposed to lead this part suddenly quit. Just vanished. Left a note saying he was going off to join a dot-com startup to ‘change the world’. This was peak dot-com bubble time, remember? So, management just dumped his workload onto the nearest junior person, which happened to be me. No extra pay, of course. Just ‘a great learning opportunity’. Yeah, right. Learned how much I hated manual data checking, mostly.
I remember finishing the last record, number 2000. I didn’t even feel relieved, just empty. I double-checked my error log – thankfully not too many, maybe a couple dozen messed-up entries. I handed the stack of marked printouts and the log sheet to my manager. He just glanced at it, said ‘Okay’, and put it on a huge pile with other stuff. No ‘thank you’, no ‘good job’. Just ‘Okay’. That was it.
Looking Back
Thinking about it now, it’s crazy how much we did manually back then. Today, you’d probably write a script in an afternoon to do the same checks. Maybe flag potentials for a human to review just the tricky ones. But 2000 records, 5 checks each, all by hand? Brutal. It definitely taught me the value of automation, that’s for sure. And maybe not to trust managers who call grunt work a ‘learning opportunity’.
