Comcast Digital Cable of Charlottesville, Virginia needed help cleaning up their address database. They had to become E911-compliant before they could offer telephone service to their customers. I came on as a temp and began comparing their data to the United States Postal Service address database. (See the DST database.)

The end result of cleaning up the database was a weekly progress report. Originally, I had nothing to do with this report. I used to watch my colleague slog through spreadsheet after spreadsheet, manually tallying up columns of figures.

I offered to automate the task. In fact, I wrote the script, simply because I couldn’t bear to watch him suffer. It was a good thing I did. Two weeks before he left, the project manager told him to show me how to “do the weekly report”. Ha!

I did the report manually, the first week after my colleague had departed. I needed to compare my new script against known data.

After a couple of false starts, I managed to get everything working.

The EADDR Statistics Generator served me well for the rest of my time at Comcast. I didn’t know if the project leader would have wanted to use it, but I wrote a user’s guide, just in case.

On my last day, I emailed it to her.

Images of the entire manual are in the Writing Section of my portfolio.