Data Entry

As it turns out, a large part of my job is data entry, which, when you're working in a non-profit who often has to prove that it's doing well, can be a very important task. Being the youngest person in my department by about 30 years, easily, I am the most computer literate person, which I feel is saying something because I've never thought of myself as much of a Noel.
But now I'm actually kind of excited about it, because I have my own little project to work on. As you may or may not know, I work at a food pantry. If people qualify, they are able to come in to St Francis House once a month and take a certain amount of food according to how many people are in their household. We have the food split up into the food pyramid...basically, sort of. We have sweets, grains, vegetables, fruits, and proteins. It is sort of loose sometimes, depending on what kind of donations we receive that day/week/month.
The last few months we've had record amounts of people coming in(over 100 a day, and that's families, not individual people), and we seem to be going through food really quickly. There is talk about trying to switch up the way we do things, and make people's amount of food based on weight, instead of category. So now it's my job to go through 6 months worth of data and look at each day and average the weight for each family size, then I have to see if there would be an issue of changing the system, and then decide how much weight each family would conceivably get.
So needless to say I can only do data entry for so many hours in a day (i.e. why I'm blogging), but I like looking at the information and seeing averages already.
I can already foresee some issues with making the food distribution weight oriented. For instance, every once in a while we get meat, and some one could easily just take all the meat that their weight allows, and then there wouldn't be enough for everyone else. I may recommend weight by category. But I'm working backwards from August, and I've only gotten to June, so I have some more work to get through.
This job also seems to make me think about food a lot, which may or may not be a good thing. I have become more aware of what kinds of foods are hard for people to get, and what is more important to a diet. Fresh is also really hard to come around. I love the idea of being organic and locally grown, but there's just no way it's possible with prices the way they are, especially in a place like Alaska in the winter.

Other than that, just chugging along at work, learning more every day. Talked to mom the other day about possibly going back to school for a masters in Program Management. The more I think about it, the more appealing it gets, especially because AmeriCorps will give me a little money to go back to school. We'll see, depends on what is available after my year of service. For now though, I think I'll enjoy the fact that I don't have homework to finish up on Sunday nights.