One of the annual milestones in my work with the college is the completion of an annual report package for the state agency in charge of higher education. The package includes a dozen different reports that cover basic demographics on each student, all of the courses taken during the academic year, categories of students, classes and so on. Several of the reports are inter-linked with cross checks to verify a variety of facts, such as that someone whom we claim is a transfer student in report “D” didn’t turn into a first-time student in report “G” and other little quirks like that.

Given that we are a small school, the job is less torturous than it might be at KU but we still manage our share of challenges. Given that we have a couple dozen different people inputting data on several thousand students across the region, we do get some conflicting bits of information. Sometimes I’ll uncover one who was listed as a returning student in the summer, a first-time student in the fall and a high school student in the spring. There are even a few who have been listed as all three in the same semester! Then, add an old whuffer like me who is trying to collect everything and bring it into some semblance of order and it’s small wonder that we started out with nearly ninety thousand “fatal errors” in the initial submission.

But, through perseverance and assistance from a helping soul in the tech department on campus and a couple others in the state agency, we were able to iron all those out and finish up the report before the deadline. Uhmm… terms like “deadline” and “fatal error” are a bit unsettling, aren’t they?

Today, I’m thankful to be done with the report and very thankful that I have a job where a fatal error doesn’t even cause a scratch. There are thousands who this morning would gladly change places with me in that regard. Where they are, fatal errors kill people.

H. Arnett
9/22/09