[Year 12 IPM] OT: Staff code/abbreviation madness thingy.

[Mark Kelly]

Hi all.  Let's call this the swan song of the 'staff code' thread and 
find new cows to ride.

Bricks J. Winzer wrote:
> Sorry for going off topic.  But I'm not subscribed to a list that might 
> carry this sort of thing.
> 
>  From my own secondary days, through teaching rounds, up to my teaching 
> career, I've often been interested to see what timetablers use to refer 
> to staff.
> 
> Hampton Park had the most efficient system I've seen.  When I was there 
> in 2004, older staff had the first three initials of their surname, and 
> newer staff had two from surname + one from first name.  E.g. I was 
> WIB.  I remember talking to the then timetabler about it, he said that 
> whilst the system was good, it had the danger of gradually getting out 
> of sync with alphabetical order.
> At Lauriston it was a similar deal but just about everyone had the two 
> surname + first initial.
> 
> St Columba's and Hawthorn have the reverse: first init + 2 from surname. 
> E.g. BWI.  Oh yeah, Heathmont had it too.  It looks awful.  There's no 
> alphabetic system in place there, too much prominence on the first 
> initial -  and one of the last things I want is kids trying to work out 
> my first name.  Actually, St Columba's had another quirk: some staff had 
> just their two initials.
> 
> Ringwood (back in late 2003) had one of the old quirky ones which used 
> just two letters.  They could be just about any combination: initials, 
> first two letters of surname, some other combo.  Very random.  One guy 
> had his first initial and the last letter of his surname.  I guess with 
> two letters you could always have clashes.
> 
> Back at my old school - the long-closed St Leo's in Box Hill - teachers 
> had either two letters (initials) or three letters (first 3 of 
> surname).  Some had initials in *lower case* too.  Very weird.
> 
> HPSC's system was the best to work with.  It was consistent, it was 
> glued on all the pigeon holes, it was on the correspondence - you knew 
> who was who very easily.
> 
> Hey I guess there is a link here - although not in IPM.
> When I did Unit 2 IT way back in 1993, I remember we built a database 
> system using dBase, and our teacher suggested to us that we all need to 
> add a key code that would make each record unique.  More unique than 
> surname alone. His system was to use four letters: three letters of 
> surname + first initial.  Now this is interesting because you could do 
> calculated fields in dBase.  It is the major beef I have with Microsoft 
> Access!  Access can't do it!
> 
> So under this four-letter system I'd be WINB.  I remember a friend of 
> mine having some fun creating names just for the codes they'd produce, 
> he had:
> Kevin Fucer
> Travis Shipley
> Tim Cunningham
> 
> Cheers
> 
> B.J.
> 
> alias
> WIB at HPSC
> BW or BWI at St Columba's
> WIB at Lauriston
> BWI at Hawthorn (although the other week I was listed as BJW somewhere, 
> which was pretty cool)
> 
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-- 
Mark Kelly
Moderator: IPM Mailing List