01/04/2023
First day on the job, and already so much to do!
I started the day off by fighting the torrential downpour of rain to take my first trip to the courthouse to pick up the papers in my boxes, sorting and recording them, ready for service. I’m all set up for excellent record keeping, which will be available both to the city and to the public.
Once that was sorted, I then spent the rest of the day still getting caught up on the other day job from my almost-entire-week off work. Balancing both hats seems pretty doable at the moment, even without any deputies. Fortunately the work lends itself to flexibility. I’m sure there will be plenty of times it seems daunting, but I’ve scaled back on my extracurriculars to settle into this position. I’m on hiatus with the orchestra. No active volunteer positions at the moment. Just the work and the family.
And of course that includes working this evening. Now that I have the first papers in hand, I’m reevaluating my data collection templates.
For the city’s purposes, I’m tracking the type of civil process order, the total number received, number returned executed, total returned unexecuted, not returned (I’m assuming this is the number of papers still out for service at the time of the report), total fee collected, and total number of hours expended. The most difficult one to track accurately will be the hours, since it’s unclear what we’re measuring here (and for what purpose). Are we looking at the labor involved in serving a single paper, if so, do we want to track it from clerk’s office to the defendant’s hands, including travel time, including administrative time to record the information, or do we also want to track the time it takes for other administrative related tasks, such as billing? Are we including administrative tasks involved with indirectly serving the papers, such as running out to buy more scotch tape to put the notices on doors?
Measurement can be difficult in that way; you really need to have a clear picture of what the data will be used for in order to create the right parameters to measure it. I went back to do graduate work in public health for the main purpose of figuring things like this out, so I’ll probably be annoying certain folks by asking these kinds of difficult questions, but “annoying people with difficult questions” is also a thing I do, so do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, I guess.
What I don’t love is statistical analysis (the idea of taking any more grad level stats classes quashed my desire to do a PhD in public health). So, rest assured that I will be outsourcing to an actual qualified statistician when it comes time to do the heavy lifting of program analysis and quality improvement.
Back to the late night quandaries of measurement, to conclude the first day on the job.
(Also, budget update: running at a current deficit of $365.42 in start-up costs. Not even including the name badge, which I commissioned during the campaign.)
