This made me LOL

The college finally found a replacement for me. He's a real winner.

An indispensable tool for doing that job is Excel (or any other spreadsheet tool). It's necessary for summarizing information in tables and charts, among other things. Anybody who has done anything with data has to have worked with spreadsheets. Certainly an institutional researcher like the new guy must possess this expertise.

The replacement recently reported for duty, and his first task will be the annual strategic plan. The whole thing is done in Excel, using a home grown system that yours truly developed. It's basically just a framework for gathering and reporting annual goals, objectives and budgetary requirements for every department/ division in the college. It's very low tech and simple; the goal was to make it easy for managers to input their plans.

Everyone loved it.

It replaced a very cumbersome and slow-moving (not to mention expensive) Filemaker-based system that was Bully VP's baby (he had the job before I had it). When I first introduced my home grown Excel tool to the president's team, the president loved it so much that he got on his knees and bowed before me, in front of them all. No kidding.

Coincidentally, Bully VP's bullying began when my home grown Excel tool started getting all the love.

While the user interface of the home-grown planning tool is simple and straightforward, the reporting aspect is a little more complicated. That doesn't matter, since it only affects the person charged with compiling the report, which, until now, was me. I set things up to accomplish in a few hours what Bully VP (and a supporting staff) needed weeks to do with the old system that everyone hated.

Now it's the new guy's problem.

There is a little bit of genius involved in getting Excel to do a big job like that in a few hours, but it is nothing a user with a moderate level of expertise can't figure out. New guy will have to figure it out, because I kept the intellectual property for myself when I quit. If the guy digs back a few years he'll find a file with all the programming. But to find it he'll have to know what he's looking for.

Well guess what? The new guy doesn't know Excel. He doesn't know spreadsheets. I don't know how he got so far into a career in institutional research without this critical expertise.

I'm having a good, hearty belly laugh at all this, because Bully VP headed up the search committee that picked this guy. Bully VP went out four times to get the right person. And for all his trouble he got a dude who doesn't even know spreadsheets.


Karma is sweet.