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#5278 – 10 miler

today i ran in my first 10-mile run. i’ve run 10 miles before, but this was the first one with a start and a finish line and prizes and so on. i had registered for the annapolis 10-miler before, back in june when i was returning from japan and before my foot/leg started bothering me. i wasn’t sure if i should run this race since, you know, foot and all, but also because i hadn’t been running since it was originally injured back in july and this race required a 12-minute-per-mile pace in order to avoid disqualification; if you haven’t maintained a 12-minute-per-mile pace by the 8 mile mark, they could tell you to move to the sidewalks and you might not be counted as a finisher since they were going to open up all the roads to traffic again at 9:45. so, a possibly sore leg and not being used to the rigors of running meant that i wasn’t sure if i’d be able to finish this race.

on the other hand, the annapolis 10 miler race both starts and ends in the parking lot across the street from my house, and actually runs right next to the house on the way to the first mile marker. so, leg injury and stamina notwithstanding, it was the sort of race that i had to try if only because it was so convenient for me.

besides, i had already paid $60 to enter this race, and i wanted the finisher’s premium.

the worst parts of the race were scaling the naval academy bridge – i, and a lot of other people, had to walk up it before running down the other side. but other than that, there were only a few parts that had some hills that needed to be walked. doesn’t mean i ran the whole rest of the race, since my leg and being winded meant i had to do a fair share of walking, but i’m not unhappy with my performance.

the water stands along the route were managed by a boy scout troop, a church (“st anne’s holy water station”), a few were managed by midshipmen from the naval academy, and other volunteers. between mile markers 5-8, lots of people had sprinklers set up in front of their houses for runners to go through, or they were using a hose nozzle to spray over the runners, or they shot at runners with super soakers. a few houses did their own water stations, and at one part there were a few people handing out sliced oranges (i’m not sure if that was an “official” race station or just someone who was giving those out in front of their house).

overall it took me just under 2 hours; my nike+ timer i started when i began the race said something like 1 hour 54 minutes, but i’ll have to wait until the actual results are posted before i’ll know what my official chip-time is.

the best thing about being in a race that starts and ends across the street from your house is crossing the street after finishing and getting in the shower while the post-race party is still going on.

my leg still feels sore, more sore than it was before the race, but not as sore as it was when it was at its worst. i’m definitely going to keep my sports medicine appointment on tuesday because, hey, at least now i have something to talk about instead of before when all i could say was “well, my left leg hurt before, and now it doesn’t, unless i bend my foot in certain directions, and even then it still doesn’t really hurt that much.” i ended up with two blisters on my right foot (left side of my hallux, and on the tip of my index toe). i had a headache earlier, and was feeling pretty hot, but some excedrin and a nap seemed to take care of that. other than that, i came through this race pretty much unscathed.

so now i’ve completed a 10K, a .01K, and a 10mi. i’m kind of glad that i’ve resigned myself to postponing the marine corps marathon until next year – since getting injured back in july, i haven’t been able to keep up with my training (which was already tough enough because of the heat… homodachi posted the portland forecast for this week and it only made me jealous and made me want to move to portland for perfect running weather… meanwhile we’ve got an incoming heat wave, yaaay.), and after doing this race today for “only” 10 miles, i don’t know how i would have been able to run more than twice that distance for the marathon.

maybe i need to find a marathon to run in february/march. that’ll give me time to train in cooler temperatures.

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#5277 – toilet humor

i applied yesterday for that student volunteer position at the cscw conference in china in march. i almost didn’t apply because i was thinking “i don’t know any chinese, and would i really really want to go?”, but then i figured why not? it’s not like i’ll really have any other chances to do this, and it’s only to be a student volunteer, and if i’m chosen then i have the option to withdraw later on if i need to, so i applied. i won’t know if i got it until november 11, so we’ll have to wait and see.

speaking of going places, i might try going to schenectady at the end of september. i got an email from my curling club that the schenectady curling club is hosting an event where two curlers from one of canada’s men’s curling teams and two curlers from team usa’s women’s olympic curling team give hands-on instruction. i’d have to make a whole 3-day weekend of it, but it’s something to consider.

i finished my rework of that payment that was done incorrectly for the past 2 years, and it turns out that we overpaid by about $425,000, and not the $536,000 that we originally thought. the $536k was based off of the previous method for calculating, but the $425k is based off of what the contract says, so that’s that. still, finding $425,000 isn’t shabby at all! my boss said today that she was going to reach out to our point-of-contact to schedule a conference call about it later this week so we can tell them that we want our money back. if it’s not on thursday, i might take that day off to go with mom and dad and anne to help move anne in to her dorm for her freshman year at college.

right when i was finishing an email to my boss and her boss about the rework, i got this crazy call from, well, not really a customer since it doesn’t matter whether or not they use our service. it turns out this lady and her husband have a cell tower on their property, and we lease it from them, and they get a check from us each month. i answered the phone with my usual “thank you for calling verizon wireless, this is glenn speaking”, and she immediately asked “is this mr. fitzpatrick??” and then starts accusing me of knowing what she’s talking about and saying that i should have taken care of her issue before since i had dealt with it before and was going on and on and i had absolutely no idea what she was talking about or even how she got my phone number. all i could decipher was that 1.) she and her husband have a tower on their property that we pay them for each month, and 2.) something about a maintenance fee that we’re supposed to pay them each month.

she asked if i’m in the department that issues payments and i said yes, but she didn’t want to listen when i tried to explain that our payments are to enterprise and government customers. i wasn’t even sure if anybody else in my department would know what in the world she was talking about, but after getting her to give me a contact number i convinced her to let me ask around and find out what the other people in my department might know. they were as puzzled as i was, but one of them knew of someone who works in a department that issues payments for cell tower leases. i ended up finding details about our payments to the customer, then a contact with the same job title that was listed on documentation for our lease payments, and reached out to her for assistance and she said she’d take it from there. we were both really confused why the customer was even calling me, but it turned out the customer had originally called someone who (i guess) gave out my name and number. i don’t know, i’m still really confused about it and still have no idea what that was all about. i’m annoyed how argumentative that lady was when i really had no idea what she was talking about, though.

at dinner tonight mom and dad were talking about how they need a new toilet for their bathroom…

mom: “maybe we should call [plumber] and have them pick out a toilet?”

dad: “it’s just a toilet. why would we want the plumber to get it?”

mom: “just to make sure that we get the right one for our bathroom.”

dad: “but why would the plumber know what kind of toilet we’d want?”

me: “ooh, you should get one of those awesome japanese toilet seats while you’re at it!”

*blank stares*

me: “…you know, awesome japanese toilet seats…?”

*blank stares*

me: *summarizes*

i don’t think they were as excited as i was about the awesome toilet that was in the hotel where cynicalscribe and i stayed when we were in japan.

*conversation turns back toward why would a plumber be better at picking out a toilet than the toilet users*

me: “ooh! i’ve got LOTS of experience with toilets. i sit on them ALL THE TIME! i’ve used lots of different ones! i can give you some good recommendations!”

anne and i kept going on that line of thought, and were pretty much ignored by mom and dad.

one week until my school starts. turns out the book for one of my classes is on backorder from the publisher, and so nobody in that class is going to have their books in time for the class to start. my other textbook shipped today, though; it’s supposed to arrive next tuesday, which is the same day that class begins. seems like that’s cutting things a little close!

eta: sweet! we could get j.d. salinger’s toilet for only $1,000,000!

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#5276 – china

hmm… i might try going to china in march.

i’ve been cleaning out my bookmarks on my computer – removing old ones that don’t work anymore, curating my delicious account – and i came across one for the 2010 CSCW conference held in savannah, georgia this past february. computer supported collaborative work was extremely interesting for me when i took a course all about it last fall. turns out the 2011 conference is in hangzhou, china from march 19-23 (right during spring break, so i wouldn’t miss any coursework), and if i get accepted as a student volunteer then i get free lodging in exchange for 20 hours of volunteer work during the conference.

extra bonus: the umbc graduate student association has a $250 travel grant that conference attendees can request for reimbursement (in exchange for 1 hour of community service for each grant received).

downside: 1 week of vacation time away from the office, but not really on vacation.

hmm.

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#5275 – looking under the sofa cushions

today at work i told my manager (my boss’ boss) that i found an error. basically, i looked under the sofa cushions at work and found us a half million dollars.

part (well, most) of my job is to submit payments to different enterprise and government customers who – as part of their contract with us – get a monthly, quarterly or a yearly payment.

sometimes their payment is based on how much they were billed during that period, sometimes it’s based on how much they paid to us during that period (the difference being we might bill them for one amount, and they might pay us a sum of money less than that billed amount, and we would pay them a percentage based on the amount of money they actually gave us), and sometimes it’s a fixed amount per line.

these customers get these payments because they end up having hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of service with us, and because they have so many lines of service with us, these payments to the customer help reimburse the customer for their administrative costs they incurred while managing all of their lines of service within their agency.

my team is made up of two other analysts besides myself (one in my office and one in little rock), my supervisor here, and my manager (my supervisor’s boss) in huntsville. each month/quarter/year, we run the appropriate SQL queries for that period, find out how much we owe each agency, send it to compliance for them to double-check, then send it to accounts payable to mail a check to the customer. and while my team and i are good at what we do, i’m definitely the most SQL-skilled employee in my team. there’s a separate team that also does reporting and is a lot more elbows-deep in SQL coding than my team and me, but they handle more advanced reporting requests. meanwhile, i’m trying to make our queries a lot more user-friendly since my teammates aren’t as familiar with SQL as i am.

the problem that my team has is that we have different queries for each different agency. while that’s not really a problem in itself, so many of our reports are based on the same 3 or 4 sets of information. the step-by-step process for processing a payment is different for each agency, even though the information we need might be the same. it shouldn’t be as complicated as it is.

well, last week i figured that there really isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t have a few core queries that we could modify to return the specific agency results that we’re looking for, so i started by looking at our contracts and writing down the key terms in each contract so i could start grouping them together and rewriting things to make them easier to read, easier to understand, and since compliance usually finds a few errors to be fixed with each payment, i wanted to make these new queries match what the contract says rather have the queries reflect the step-by-step instructions that had been handed down from department to team to department to team over the past 2 years or so.

i started by rewriting one query in particular since it said that we pay a fixed amount for each line that has a voice and data combination plan, and a different fixed amount for each line that has a data only plan. it’s pretty simple compared to our other reports, but while i was putting this together, i saw this key sentence buried in the section of the contract about our payment: “This fee will only be paid on collected revenue.”

now, what does that mean, “collected revenue”? it means that we should only be paying this fee to the customer for each month that they paid towards their bill. if they didn’t make a payment towards a bill one month, then we don’t pay their fee for that month. it’s a bit trickier than that if you get into the nitty-gritty, but that’s the key part. we should be only be paying this fee when we received a payment for that account that month. if the customer didn’t pay their bill, then we don’t have to pay that fee for that account that month.

when i looked at the history for this payment and compared it to my rewritten query, it turns out that since 10/2008 when this payment went into effect, each quarter we were paying out for about twice the number of lines that were actually eligible for payment; we were overpaying our obligation each quarter since we were paying the customer’s fee even when the customer didn’t make a payment towards their bill that month.

when i added up the total payments we had made from 10/2008 through 6/2010, and compared it to the results i got for that same time period, it turned out that we had overpaid by just over $536,000. that’s right, over half a million dollars that we get to tell the customer we paid to them in error and want back since it wasn’t paid out according to the terms of the contract. ka-ching!

so i told my supervisor about it on friday when i found out about how much we had overpaid (at that time it was “only” $435,000 since we didn’t have all the payment data we needed), and we figured that it was good that my manager and one of the other analysts were coming up from huntsville and little rock respectively this week to visit and so we could have some team meetings and so on. told my manager about it today (and half-jokingly asked “can i have a raise?” when she saw how much it was), did some more work, and ended up finding it’s closer to $536,000 than the $435,000 i had originally expected. later on my manager told her boss (my associate director) about my find to toot my horn a bit.

i also discovered that if i didn’t catch this error then we’d be paying out about $306,000 per year in error. now, the original process and my current query checks for the type of device (PDA or blackberry vs. data card) instead of the type of plan (voice and data vs. data only), so i need to modify my query to match that part of the contract, but even still i don’t expect the sum to change much if at all.

and this is just the first of several queries i’m looking at, and probably the most basic of those payments as well! who knows if the other queries might turn up money, too? in any case, this is definitely résumé material, and i’m curious to see how this impacts my yearly bonus (since that’s subject to a multiplier based on how well the company / your department / you did) and yearly raise. unfortunately, i don’t think that any increase this would bring to my salary would be as much as i’d like it to be to meet my goal of moving out and starting to pay off student loans next year, which is unfortunate.

i started to edit my photos from the trip to the virgin islands tonight, but it took forever to geotag them with my gps and import them into aperture (one of the reasons for me writing this post was because i didn’t have much else to do while importing), i’m ready now to just go to bed now instead. i don’t know why, but the last week or so i’ve been really tired as soon as i get home from work.

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#5274 – oh yeah

oh yeah, and also:

i’ve decided to stay with my job at least through my master’s degree. not only is it my ticket for tuition reimbursement for my master’s, but if i left before the end of december i lose out on my yearly bonus, and if i leave before the end of january then i lose out on a long-term bonus that vests at the end of january. so, my plan is to stick around for a little under a year at least to ride this gravy train before i try finding something that might pay me more so i can move out, get a place of my own, pay off student loans, etc.

doctorates are good and all, but that wouldn’t be completed until at least my 32nd birthday, and there’s no way you’d catch me living at home in the basement then. 😛 plan is to get my master’s and then get out as soon as i can.