What to Wear to a Late Afternoon Meeting

So you know those kinds of projects where someone says, Hey, could you do this little thing for me real quick?  And it seems straightforward enough...until you start doing it.  And then it turns into a complete disaster?  That was how my week went.

We had been sent a list of records for people in a subset of our programs and asked to supply data on X for each of those records.  I'm currently the analyst in charge of X, so this got sent to me.  But uh-oh.  We've never looked at the X data for this category of programs before so the X data that I had was incomplete.  Like really, really incomplete.  Like missing X data for 2300 of 7500 records.  For some of these records, that makes sense.  You only get X data in the system when you complete the program, and the nature of the programs (i.e., populated by people who were not getting it done in our regular programs) meant that we would likely have a lot of drop outs.  But not this many!  I mean, one program of over 1100 people had no X data in our datafile at all, and it's not conceivable that every single person failed the complete the program.

I was able to figure out where the X data were for about 650 of those records (well of course one program decided to report their data under an identifying number associated with a different program for maximum confusion) were but the rest were a mystery.  I spent basically all of Thursday trying to get a handle on these missing records.  It's particularly odd because for a lot of them, I could see the X data in the front end of our database system, but for some reason, the records were not pulled through when our systems analyst queried the database to produce the datafile of X data (the X File?) for me.

I had a meeting in the late afternoon with two of the high level administrators for the programs in question.  I found out that this request for data was part of a legislative request of our regulatory body to produce a report on the efficacy of this category of program.  At one point, one of the administrators said to me, Hey, no pressure, but there is $60 million riding on this.

ACK.

Pattern Challenge Day 15: Lace and Day 11: Pinstripes -- Thursday, 1/29/15

The data were a mess but my look was together, fulfilling two pattern challenges at once.

Light blue lace-front sweater (Kohls)
*Navy pinstripe blazer (thrifted, The Limited)
Grey pants (thrifted, Loft)
Pink/blue floral scarf (Target)
Grey ankle boots by Seycelles

Do I get bonus points for matching roses on the scarf to roses on the lace sweater?  You bet I do.