So Not the Drama (or not)

In the fall of 1983, I was entering my last year of a three-year M.F.A. program in Theater Administration at the Yale School of Drama. Yeah, I know what you're thinking…what does that have to do with data warehouse consulting? Well, consulting as we know it at Pcon involves solving problems. Here are some of the problems presented to students in the Admin program at the time:

• How do you convince an actor that the fluorescent lights in the rehearsal hall are not sapping his vitamin D?
• When an actress complains that the water coming out of the faucet in her theater-provided apartment is too hot, how do you suggest she should add some more cold water to the mix without tacking "you idiot" to the end of your sentence?
• How do you convince the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant that taking a cab from Boston to New Haven is perhaps not the best use of funds?

I was the only student with a finance emphasis at the time, so (thankfully) my problems did not involve actors. I was working for the Business Manager of YSD/Yale Repertory Theater. The problems we faced were slightly different:

• How do we reconcile our (manually maintained) list of department purchase orders with the mainframe printouts from the University when the recent University accounting system conversion truncated the final character of the PO number?
• How do we avoid suffocation under the mountain of adding machine tape necessary to foot and cross-foot our 11 x 24  green ledger pages?
• What's the best way to hide the enormous calluses on our fingers (caused by prolonged contact with mechanical pencils)?

Enter the miracle.

My boss brought in a Compaq "portable" computer (which would probably be rejected by most modern airlines as exceeding their carry-on size limits). If I recall correctly, it had a single 5-1/4 inch floppy drive. The character-based screen was about the size of the display on one of my dad's oscilloscopes.

I adored it. Compared to mechanical pencils and green ledger sheets? Oh, yeah. It was heaven.

Using version 1.0 of Lotus 1-2-3 and RTFM, I used key-stroke macros to create a set of consolidated financial reports for the school and theater - the first that did not involve an IBM Selectric typewriter and a bucket of Liquid Paper.

This was the first time I used technology to improve a business process. It was a life-changing event. In a way, this is always in the back of my mind whenever I approach a new project. The client's data access/reporting difficulties play the part of the green ledger sheets and mechanical pencils. Our design and implementation of the data mart and business intelligence reporting solutions play the part of the Compaq and key-stroke macros.

Play the part….right.  Maybe data warehouse consulting isn't that far removed from drama school after all.