I have built things my whole life, since early on up to and including tomorrow.
The greatest rewards come from building something that allows someone else, or even myself, to be able to do something they are not able to do, or to do it more safely or more efficiently.
I built spreadsheets for my ex-common-law wife’s store. It was terrific to take a process that she or others had spent half an hour to numerous hours, repeatedly (daily, weekly, monthly) and automate the process so that it happened instantaneously or after only a few minutes of copying and pasting. The first thing I did was I took the staff schedule and put in formulas to total the hours worked each day, and a subtotal for each week, and a total for every two week pay period. Gone were the hours spent calculating hours worked every payday.
I took the requirements for sick leave accumulated and taken, built a spreadsheet, and just by entering a staff person’s start up information, their first day of benefits, and then any day they took as sick leave, we would have an accurate record of whether they were entitled to sick leave taken, and how many days they had remaining.
One of the last things I did was I took that schedule/payroll spreadsheet and automated another spreadsheet to read the last nine weeks of schedules to calculate out Holiday Pay for each statutory holiday. That got interrupted so many times, and there were so many odd things to take into account, that it took me the longest to finish, nearly six months. But when I left it worked like a charm.
The second biggest thing I did was take the End of Day reporting process, eliminate the need to print and then re-enter figures for the day into other spreadsheets, and took the process for one staff person who used it the most from a 35 minute process to a 12 minute process each evening. And it exposed all sorts of errors in the software generated numbers, usually an error in communication between two pieces of software, but also all sorts of errors made at the till; and it made it possible within minutes of finding and fixing the problem to verify that the error was fixed correctly. Before these errors simply went undetected … and lost the business hundreds of dollars.
The biggest thing I did was build a very large spreadsheet that updated costs, set prices, discounts, and various other details for items sold in the store. It was more complicated than anything else I’d done and I barely got a chance to use it to set prices.
That’s a story for later.
So what’s this all about now?!
With the right tool, creative imagination, and hard work it is amazing what can be done!
And this tool is amazing. I’m able to make cuts accurate down to a 64th of an inch! And more than that … well the sander barely has to do anything to even those variations out!
So this helped produce another desk, this one for my second oldest son. Build just right to fit his cramped room and his computer use … and the ability to get the desk up the tight stairwell to his room. So it’s assembled mostly like the others with glue and finishing nails, but some crucial joints, including attaching the desktops, are screwed in place. So it can be finished, oiled, dried and let the smell dissipate, and then disassembled, carried upstairs and reassembled in place.
The right tools, the right imagination, and good work!