Creepypasta

The Value Of Data

I wanted to post this earlier, but I needed more information first. It was creepy and I wanted to make sure I had all my facts straight.

I’m a data manager for a local Early Childhood program, this means I work with a database and parse information as people need. Copying data into spreadsheets, graphing, writing analysis on the state of this or that aspect of the program, and having to help prepare comprehensive documents for my boss to use when talking with very important people (School district Superintendent, Board of Education, Reporters, etc.) What I do not do is directly manage the database or its servers. While I have some high-level controls I can’t mess with the underlying code. That job is contracted out to a company on the other side of the country and if there is a bug in the system or a dependency is unclear I have to contact them to get everything straightened out.

Usually the problems are routine and I can get an answer back right away, however...

It was a couple of months ago I noticed something odd while compiling the usual monthly program report. The Tucker building was over enrolled by one child, not necessarily a cause for a freak out. A problem like this is pretty routine and usually due to a family leaving the program and their assigned social worker not removing them from the system while at the same time another family is brought in. So I checked for the most obvious signs of a family being terminated, and nothing. So I checked the enrollment list for the past 30 days. No extra child had been enrolled since.

I knew I needed to find out which child was the extra, so I checked the number of children enrolled in each class. 20 each. Every room. Completely normal. Starting to feel like the computer was mocking me I went back to the full site report and clicked the enrollment number, bringing me to the full report. Copied that out to an excel column, went to each class individually and copied their roster to the next column, and then subtracted names from the second column on the first. I was left with one name: Marryanne Watts.

So I went back to the database and searched for Ms. Watts. Found her information. Standard stuff name, address, social, contact numbers, race, program options. However there were two things that were abnormal: Her birth date was listed as October 14th 1990, and she was listed as enrolled in Tucker, but no classroom was listed. Ok, the former weirdness you probably get since that was nearly two decades before information systems became ubiquitous, but let me explain the second: when a child enrolls the system requires certain information to be entered or it kicks back an error popup and tells you to fix your shit. The Site/Class pairing is one of those requirements.

Feeling at a loss I emailed the registration team and Tucker’s director and asked if they could identify Marryanne. The responses came at different times, but neither knew of the girl or could find any information on her or her family. It was probably just a glitch and I sent in a help ticket to the database support team. Most likely they were doing some maintenance on our database and another program’s database and something slipped (how? I don’t know, but it was the best theory I had at the time).

Someone had to type all that information and the initial enrollment is such a pain in the ass that I didn’t want the person to have to do it again, and having personal information like that just moving around is a violation of federal law and could cost us or another program its federal funding if it was discovered and I didn’t want that to happen because an overworked tech wrote a bad line of code.

The customer service team for our database management company has always been amazing. Usually I get a response within an hour or two and fixes are done within 24 hours. That is unless the issue needs to be sent off to the development team...and guess where a problem like a strange entry defying the programed restrictions needs to go. Yup the CS person that got my ticket saw it, said it was “really strange” and told me they would need to “forward this to development.” Crap.