Geek Heaven

As some of you may know, I have a new job working back in the construction industry as a bookkeeper. I had been glad to get out of bookkeeping when I went to work at Learning Today, but the environment there quickly changed my mind.

Most people want their bookkeeper to be a mindless bean counter, which, as you know if difficult for me. the mindless part, that is. Most people also think their bookkeepers need to be women. The sex of the applicant should be irrelevant, but it makes it near impossible for me to find work. Compounding this is the number of bookkeepers who are dumber than bricks. it astounds me how they can have a job when I have so much trouble finding work.

Luckily, my current employer needed someone who could work the warehouse and unload trucks, so I was able to get a leg up for this position, because I've done that before, and I have experience working in the construction industry. As usual, when I finally found a job, my skillset was a perfect fit.

I enjoy bookkeeping, but one of the things that bothers me is that there is usually very little room for innovation. You learn their system, you do it their way. If you suggest improvements, you're rocking the boat. It's how I've lost most of my jobs, thinking too much. Luckily, my current employers loves that. Anything that will improve productivity is alright by him. I'm implementing all sorts of new procedures to improve how we track jobs and inventory.

What I'm really excited about are the chances to work with ideas I've never been able to explore before. Until now, I've had relatively little exposure to Access. We needed a way to track service calls, and I suggested that we could do it with Access. My boss gave me a go, and when I presented the finished product, he was impressed and thankful. He also liked the Excel vacation tracker that I created and the Excel job mapper that I created.

The mapper is the one that I'm really proud of. The first part was easy. We do alot of Winn Dixie service calls, and I wanted a tool that would allow me to type a store number and give me all of the pertinent information. I set up a table and used lookup commands to pull up the information.

We also map the locations for our plumbers, so I thought it would be useful if the tool could create the map at the push of a button. When I started, I was pretty sure it could be done, but I didn't have a clue of how I would get it to work. I did my research and found some guy doing similar projects, but neither worked for me. After a few hours of studying what they had done, I was able to figure out how to read the information from specific cells and how to send it to a web browser. Once I figured that out, it was simple to create the Macro. I love doing this kind of stuff.