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

[Bricks J. Winzer]

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)