I officially dug into the Phase II files this week.
Remember that my task is to sort the files numerically, according to the case numbers.
Digging into the boxes, I discovered that about half of the files don't have case numbers written on them.
Some of them don't even have names.
For the first few days, I chunked all of the un-numbered files into boxes and moved them to another room. I called the guy in charge of records, told him what I was doing, and suggested that he could send someone to get the files and put case numbers on them. He said, "Ok," and stopped by my workroom a couple of days later. By that time, there were a dozen file boxes filled with un-numbered files. He said, kind of vaguely, he'd get somebody to look at them. Yesterday, he came to the building for some other reason and poked his head in the workroom. He got all excited when he saw how much the pile of boxes had been reduced. The poor guy doesn't realize how much work will be left to do once the boxes are emptied.
Doing Phase I and Phase II is teaching me one thing: my parents were right about some things.
They would gasp to hear me say that.
You must know that I was born and raised in - and still live in - a small rural community. Growing up, my parents would occasionally warn me away from some kid, saying his/her family was just generally bad. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." It usually turned out that I did not quite gee-haw with that kid, anyway, but I initially approached classmates with an "innocent until proven guilty" attitude. Looking through these records, I see that my parents were right to peg some kids as "penitentiary bound" just because of their last names. Them and all their kin. "Is it nature or nurture," as they say?
The subject is far too complicated for margarita night.
I still have the kneezles.
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