Ah, “saffers.” Yeah, I remember that one. It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, let me tell you. This whole thing landed on my plate out of nowhere, really.
My Tangle with the Saffers Initiative
It all started on a Monday morning. My manager, old Jim, he just sort of ambled over to my desk. He had this look, you know? The one that says, “I’ve got something you’re not going to like.” He dropped this ancient-looking binder, thick as a brick, right on my keyboard. “Sort out these ‘saffers’ reports,” he mumbled, and then poof, gone before I could even ask what “saffers” even meant.
So, there I was, stuck with this mystery. First thing I did was actually open the binder. It was a total mess. We’re talking coffee-stained pages, handwritten notes I could barely read, printouts from a dot-matrix printer – the works. It looked like a scrapbook of someone’s bad ideas from the last decade.
My mission, should I choose to accept it (and I didn’t really have a choice), was to make sense of it all. Here’s basically what I ended up doing, step by step:
- First up: I spread everything out on the big meeting table. Just to see the scale of the chaos, you know? It covered the whole thing.
- Then: I started grouping things. Tried to find any kind of pattern. This looked like a financial report, that seemed like a customer complaint. Slow work, real slow.
- Next: I had to track down the original authors, or anyone who knew anything. This was the “fun” part. Some people had left the company years ago. Others just stared blankly when I mentioned “saffers.” One guy, Bob from accounts, actually remembered! But he only remembered arguing about it in a meeting in 2012. Not super helpful.
- After that: I began typing up the salvageable bits. Tried to put them into some kind of standard format. Lots of retyping, lots of squinting at faded ink.
- Finally: I put together a summary. A sort of “Here’s what I think the ‘saffers’ stuff was, and here’s what’s maybe still useful.” It was a hefty document by the end.
I handed my report back to Jim. He just grunted, took it, and I never officially heard the word “saffers” again. Just like that. Months of work, digging through this ancient pile of… well, stuff. And then, silence. That’s how it goes sometimes, right? You just do the job, document your bit, and move on to the next fire. But yeah, that was my “saffers” experience. A real journey into the archives, that one.
