DE Ops: मुन्ता, नही मुत्रा

Jeff has been living in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, running his survey. He came back for a few days for Holi and setting up Data Entry, but before he came back, I was helping oversee some preliminary data entry for him. Basically, we hired some temporary workers (Data Entry Operators - DEOs) to read names off a government website and type them in Hindi in Excel (they can't be copied and pasted, unfortunately). This means learning to use the really nifty English-phonetic Hindi font that we use, which is really straightforward except for some weird conjunct characters.

Part 1: Virginia learns to defer to Hindi speakers when they politely correct her about the spelling of a Hindi word.

I was doing a "spot-check" (basically peeking over periodically to see how things were going), and noticed what looked like a spelling mistake - someone had written "मुन्ता" (muntaa), when it looked like they should have written "मुत्रा" (mutraa)* . I intervened and asked them to correct the mistake, which inexplicably prompted giggles from the whole room. Understandably perplexed, I asked what was going on - finally, someone explained that even though it looked like the name was मुत्रा, it couldn’t be, because that word apparently means "pee" (Google Translate doesn't say so, but Google Translate doesn't know everything). I giggled along with everyone else and let them get back to work.

Part 2: Virginia learns that teaching typing takes time.

I was getting frustrated at the slow typing speed of our typists**, so I devised a plan. I came into the office early and hacked away at a cardboard box (thanks mom!) until I created these:

What are they, do you ask? Well, in my typing class in elementary school, our instructor covered our hands with cut-out shoe-boxes so we couldn't see the keyboard, which forced us to memorize the placement of the keys and not stare at our hands while we typed (which our DEOs do constantly). Annoying as heck, but extremely effective.

I had this grand notion that I would enforce these hand-made hand-covers and before long, viola! Master typists! Of course, a 60-year-old man is much more convincing to a 10-year-old child than I am to my age-contemporaneous staff when it comes to wacky experiments. After about 5 minutes of sticking their heads under the boxes to see the keys, they gave up. And I didn't have the heart to force them. A colleague suggested that I look up free typing lessons online for them, but I haven't made the effort yet.

So basically, I'll let Jeff take care of his Data Entry operations….

*I'm not actually sure of the correct spelling, since I was too embarrassed to ask later

**For comparison, Jeff types one of these documents in about 25 minutes. I take about 45 (I know, Jeff's better than I am, but he has a year's experience of reading Hindi names on me, so he processes them faster than I do). Our DEOs take about 3 hours.