HR just sent us an email announcing a companywide "cleaning day" where we all band together and get our offices spick and span.
I'm sure there are good reasons for this: people work better without clutter, scrubbing what used to be an orange out the back of the office fridge encourages bonding, and who doesn't work harder when they smell like Windex?
I have a few problems with cleaning day. For one, my desk is immaculate. Really. When I leave for the day viral pathologists use my office as a clean room.
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Second, the HR notice specifically said to "[throw out files you don't need] but I would suspect that most files now reside on your computer." The implication being that, for some reason, computers are exempt from cleaning day.
Why?
People will douse themselves in Purell whenever anyone within 10 miles coughs, but the idea of keeping our inboxes organized is somehow beyond our capabilities.
Look at FreeERISA. In November, we added 185,640 new 5500 filings, averaging 480 fields per plan. That's 88,627,200 individual data points that we need to make sure are "clean."
If we took each plan and laid them out, they'd cover an area of 755 square miles – roughly the area of Los Angeles and New York City combined. That's a lot of clutter.
We run hundreds of algorithms and perform a dozen sanity checks on the data to insure that it's complete and useable before it goes into our system.
If we "cleaned" our data the way that our HR department wants us to clean our computers (i.e. not at all), everyone would be searching for 402(k) plans in Manitoba that were filed in 1909. Not a good way to do business!
This has been a plea for greater computer hygiene.
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