It’s 77F degrees outside and humid. The air’s hardly moving. In a few hours, the rain is supposed to arrive and settle in for the night. In the meantime, the weather and my afternoon coffee are conspiring to raise my own temperature to just below irritation.

This past Friday, I received a clarification call from one of the companies I’ve interviewed with. They were already a day past the last “expect to hear something within 48-hours at the latest,” and today they’re almost two days past the “later today or tomorrow.” The job hunt? Just like the weather…

NAQCC, the North American QRP CW Club (http://http://naqcc.info/), is one of those groups I really support in spirit, but in practice I’m rarely there. They promote low-power Morse code communications among ham radio operators. If all you have is very low power, Morse code is undoubtedly the way to go; and, if you’re into the minimal or emergency communications, it’s worth staying in practice. That said, given Morse code routinely losing favor as a skill and the tail end of an 11-year solar cycle low, it’s been a challenging activity for a few years. But, folks are predicting the solar cycle is turning toward the next upward swing. Just like the weather…

Anyway, the NAQCC folks operate largely by bulk email. For instance, once a month someone in the club sends an email to the membership announcing it’s time again to submit your items for sale or trade. Sometime later, there will be another email to the membership with the compiled list.

Unless we get an email saying it may not happen this round because the maintainer will be in the hospital for a bit.

It’s apparently an entirely manual process. The fellow solicits the emails, receives the emails, approves them for suitability, combines the offerings into a list, and sends that compilation out to the membership. If that fellow’s not available, it doesn’t happen.

I’ve seen this kind of thing before, and I’m seeing it more often: People and their manual processes. They’re easily automated; still, the people are set in their ways. They don’t even want to consider change. What else would they do with their days?

I don’t know if that’s the case this time. This time, I’m not even going to ask. Instead, I’m writting a little webapp on the side as an exercise – to see how I, a person who in no way would want to spend all of those hours in that routine every month, might do it if I had to.

Impossible processes. You know you could help, but people are set in their ways. It’s going to take as long as it takes.

Kind of like the weather.

Happy Monday.