Sidney was still reliving his date with Hannah Harper when the fire alarm went off. As Gwen Gardner put on her bright orange bib and took control Sidney was trying to convince Work Experience girl Penelope Pottersgate that she really hadn’t got time to finish her curly wurly before leaving the building. Even though Sidney knew it was a practice he still didn’t want to feel the wrath of Gwen Gardner.
Sidney had enjoyed babysitting Sam with Hannah last week. The small boy had found Sidney very funny even when Sidney wasn’t trying to be. Sam repeatedly said “he’s funny” and this just made Hannah like Sidney more. The date went very well and even ended with a long kiss which was only stopped when the small boy appeared and said “that’s funny”.
The Fire Drill was not going well with Gwen Gardner struggling with her headcount. It appeared that there were several people unaccounted for. As it was raining the lined up staff in the car park were not happy. Penelope Pottersgate was also complaining that her granddad would not be happy that she was getting wet.
Pottersgate Paints’ SharePoint project was going well and Sidney spent the afternoon working with Purchasing Manager Beryl Buyer on designing a Purchase Order system on SharePoint. Beryl was a lady who wanted things exactly right and Sidney had difficulty trying to persuade her to compromise. The first issue was the PO number system that Beryl wanted to continue from their current system. This meant that the first entry would have to be number 2478 and then increase sequentially. Sidney had decided to use a calculated field to do this. His idea was to create a field called ‘PO Number’ and calculate it as the ‘ID’ number plus 2477. Sidney was quite pleased with this as the ‘ID’ number was the unique item number in the SharePoint List starting with 1. Beryl Buyer was not sure and suggested instead they start on 2500 as she wasn’t ready yet to move to the new system and would need some SharePoint training first. Sidney thought his calculated field was going well but Beryl Buyer was not happy about the output. It was putting a comma in to mark the thousand. So 2500 became 2,500. An option would be to change it from a number format field to a text format field. Sidney tried this but then quickly realised this then stopped the calculation working. Beryl Buyer indicated that she was too busy to waste her time if they couldn’t fix this and would just use the old system.
Back in the IT Office Penelope Pottersgate was complaining about being bored after playing solitaire for an hour and Sidney was trying to Google the answer to his SharePoint comma problem. Colin was making a round of hot drinks even though they only had the emergency powered milk left. As Colin put Sidney’s mug of tea with white bits floating on it in front of Sidney it gave Sidney an idea. The mug was his Action SharePoint mug with the catch phrase words “Don’t be a SharePoint Mug call Action SharePoint on 0121 3680055”, on. Sidney quickly rang the number and explained his problem to the SharePoint Consultant (The problem with the commas not how to keep a Work Experience entertained). Sidney was delighted to find that there was a workround for this and in just two minutes he was reading an email from Action SharePoint with the fix. It involved using the calculation =FIXED([ID]+2500,0,TRUE). According to the SharePoint Consultant ‘,0’ meant no decimal places and ‘TRUE’ meant use ‘no commas’. Sidney was so excited he quickly tried it on the Purchasing SharePoint site. It worked!!
Sidney was feeling quite pleased with himself after his SharePoint success so took the chance to ring Hannah Harper’s extension and ask if she fancied coming out for a romantic meal with him as he had a two-for-one voucher for Pizza Express.
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