A Q & A

So people are always writing in to this blog and asking things like, “Why don’t you tell us more about yourself?” or “What do you actually do for a living?” or “Did you make us up as a kind of validation or just to make yourself seem cool?”

Well, I will answer some of these burning questions. You’re welcome.

First, I am trying to maintain an aura of mystery around myself! It’s totally working too. No, actually I would usually rather write these short little non sequiturs of inanity that go on and on about myself. I mean, if I wasn’t writing posts about the wild cocaine orgies at NASA you might never hear about them.

Second, I will now tell you a small bit about my work. I won’t tell you anything specific because I have no interest in getting fired at the moment (though my mother was kind of encouraging it recently because the unemployment benefits keep getting extended on account of the Great Recession, which is apparently what we have named this thing) but I will tell you that what I do is analyze numbers for a credit card processing company. Basically every month I take a whole lot of raw information and I plug it into some database software (Microsoft Access, mostly) and then I do some other stuff and the computer thinks real hard and spits out some more information and then I go through that information and I “audit” it and then once I am confident that all of these numbers have been squished together correctly, I pay people based on the numbers.

It is even less exciting than it sounds. There is also a lot of math. The kind of math that when you had it in high school you were all like, “When the hell am I ever going to need to know this?”

Now you say, “Oh god, that’s what you do for a living?”

“Yes,” I answer solemnly.

“But why are you telling us about this now?” You ask.

“Well, I’m glad you asked.” And I am.

Because I just found this note that I wrote last month. It is written to the guy at work that is the database expert (he tells me how to do the stuff I need to do), his name is Curt and he’s a cool guy.

This is a real note, BTW. This is not some cute thing I wrote for my blog. This is something I was stressed out about.






If you can’t read it because of my richly nuanced handwriting or because the scan is bad, it says:

Curt – Double check if the Volume Variance Report is accurately reflecting the sum of all Net volumes or if Discover still only reflects gross income before refunds and chargebacks.

Yeah, that’s what I do for a living.

The report wasn’t, BTW, but we fixed it.

So that’s what I do for a living.

What was the third question?

Oh! I remeber now.

Yes and yes.

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