It occurred to me today that a proper inventory is an important tool for us all.

I am the technology director for the school district where I work. What this means is that I fix things that have electrical cords. I maintenance things that have electrical cords. I assign things that have electrical cords.

I also count things that have electrical cords. This process is called inventory, and sometimes (shhhh, don’t tell), I use it as a cover.

It is not unusual for me to walk into a teacher’s room in my school district to investigate different problems that may be occurring that I need to address. For example, say Sally Sunshine, a teacher in my district, has installed software on her computer that, unbeknownst to her, is giving away her banking information to foreign web servers. Since I am pretty decent at what I do, I would get multiple reports about activity like this on my network, from various different sources, and I would protect Sally from the foolish thing that she did by installing the coupon add-on for her internet browser. But, to get a sense of how this may have happened in the first place, it might be necessary for me to go to Sally’s room.

When I get to Sally’s room, rather than say to her, in front of her classroom full of students, “Hey, it looks like you’ve done something dumb on your computer, so I’m here to check it out.” I just say something like, “I’m doing some inventory.” Then, I can do what I need to do, and check what I need to check, to make things right again.

Now, none of this is to say that I don’t actually do inventory in the school district, because I do –> a lot of it. But, because I am normally spending so much time on inventory, it becomes an easy thing to say when I am walking into someone’s room and they give me a questioning look. I simply say, “Inventory”, and they turn their attention back to their students and ignore me.

If it weren’t for the inventory work that I do for the school district, we wouldn’t know what we have or what we still need to think about purchasing. An inventory is an important tool for knowing what you have.

And it makes for a great cover.

* * *

Nothing drives me crazier at my house than when something gets purchased for the house and we already have it. Someone buys chicken stock and we already have two containers of it, or someone buys onion soup mix and we already have three boxes of mix. We’ve arrived at the place, on a couple of occasions, where we have had to make a note to stop being a certain thing because we have two dozen of them at the house and it is going to be a very long time before we ever run out of what it is that we have, because we’ve purchased one here or two there, time and time again.

Equally frustrating is when we need something and we run out of it, simply because someone decided that it was okay to use the last of something without adding it to the shopping list. Then, when I go to get some Worcestershire sauce and we don’t have any, not even any unopened bottles in the dry pantry, I get a little peeved.

The issue here is an issue of inventory.

And it’s not like we don’t have tools that we can use to try to make the process of keeping an inventory as simple as possible. We are big fans of Amazon, and we have several Alexa devices all over the house. We’ve been using the Alexa app, in conjunction with those devices, to try to keep a shopping list that everyone can add stuff to and everyone can use when they go to the grocery store. In our house, when something gets low on the inventory list, we walk up to an Alexa device and we say, “Alexa, add avocados to the shopping list”, and she does it.

Or, if we’ve purchased it on Amazon before, we just reorder it.

Two days ago, I changed the furnace filter in the basement. When I did this, I noticed that it was the last one in the box of them that I had, sitting next to the furnace in the basement. I thought I remembered ordering them from Amazon before, so I brought the label from the last one upstairs to the nearest Alexa device and I said, “Alexa, reorder 3M Filtrete Clean Living filters.” They arrived today while I was at work.

But, nothing is fool-proof. When my son adds ill-advised items to the shopping list (“Alexa, add ‘Forza Motorsport 7’ to the shopping list”), or when we go shopping and we neglect to check the shopping list on the app, then the inventory process goes awry.

Additionally, my wife and I belong to two different breeds of shoppers. I am probably your typical male shopper –> with a list of ten items, I will enter a store, retrieve those ten items, and be back in the car in fifteen minutes. My wife does not approach shopping this way. She will enter the store without any need for a shopping list and without any inclination to look at one if one exists. Instead, my wife can shop for ten items (ten items that are on a list that she doesn’t care about or check) and be in the store for an hour. She will come out, sixty minutes later, with twenty items –> six of the ten additional items are things that no one else even knew we were out of and the other four items, of the additional ten, were items that we were going to run out of very soon.

At the end of the day, someone needs to perfect a method for a family to manage an inventory so that, when something gets low in the inventory, it just magically gets refilled.

* * *

I feel like I have more to say on this matter, including the point I was originally hoping to make, before all of this other stuff jumped in the post. So, tomorrow, I will finish it up.