Fixity

The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing is living up to its name, at least the "extreme" part. Okay, okay, the Friendly Neighborhood Center...has another official name to which RantWoman feels obliged to try to attach mainly positive brand identity. At the Friendly Neighborhood Center though, RantWoman feels obliged to walk a scarier line between truth in advertising and grabbing some kind of brand identity from all sorts of  circumstances.

By all sorts of circumstances, RantWoman means monumental miscommunications, diversity on steroids, and mistakes of varying scope and consequence. These are the sort of circumstances that people excessively attached to happy talk or people distressed when their sincere utmost can so quiclykly prove inadequate may wish to pretend never occur. They are stock in trade, part of the brand, a core part of who the friendly Neighborhood Center ...is!

For example, consider alphabetization. One day an intern learning office skills was asked to alphabetize some files. Intern is from another country. In intern's natal land they use the Latin alphabet, but there are a couple places where the alphabetization rules differ from preferred practice by the English monoloinguals at the Friendly Neighborhood Center....

RantWoman, now past 50, is frightened to discover herself rapidly doddering toward a certain geriatric fixity of view about How the World Is Supposed to Be. Intern is slightly older than RantWoman and may have additional cultural or religious reasons for fixity of view. The office manager asked intern to alphabetize. Intern needed to argue about it, first with office manager in English and then for half an hour in her native language with another person from a different country who shares her native language. The rules are different. RantWoman subsequently confirmed the matter of different rules with someone she knows who did Peace Corps work in Intern's natal land. Be that as it may, the correct answer for an office full of people used to US English rules is to DO IT THE WAY ONE IS ASKED. Except that at the Friendly Neighborhood Center..., having a long and pointless argument about it first is called vocational training, training in personnel management for everyone else at the VERY least.

Today's Department of Pointless Arguments and Going Around and Around has to do with data we ask people to provide about their race / ethnicity. Providing this data is OPTIONAL. We strive for the same standards of service regardless and no matter what. Unfortunately, RantWoman who helped design the form today collided with the point that we did not give people a single option to identify as multi-ethnic / multiracial. RantWoman collided with  this point because Office Manager was dutifully asking a new user to complete the form and new user marked every single option listed.
Office Manager pointed this out to RantWoman. Then Office Manager made a bunch of assumptions based on the appearance of the person completing the form. RantWoman had to say "But we don't  know that...." Then RantWoman learned that others have also marked more than one option.

Unfortunately, RantWoman learned that Office Manager takes a bookkeeping approach to data entry. Office manager is one of those people who can become over the moon with delight when her rows and columns balance. If Office Manager input all the items people check, she says she could wind up with percentages that add up to more than 100. RantWoman wants to  know what would be wrong with that. People check more than one box because that is who they are. But mow, in addition to the lengthy argument and the bookkeeping practice, now we also get to decide, if we change how we record and report things, what we want to happen as far as discontinuities in definitions over time.
RantWoman would SO much rather ditther about, say, which new shoes to buy!