Trousses de pharmacie

Spent the night lying awake, not out of worry, but out of curiosity about how to organise a spreadsheet to deal with the need to replace, at wildly varying times, the many medical supplies the boat carries. Some of the products, like injectable adrenalin, a real life-saver, need to be ultra-fresh. Pretty well everything we carry has an expiry date.

The inventory system needed to be simple, because other people than me will be having to modify and update it, and it needed to be transportable, because it is to go on several different computers. It also had to distinguish which of the two medical kits the item belongs to, so more than one search criterion will have to be applied.

I finally decided against a spreadsheet programme, as the learning curve is high, and there is no need, anyway, for any inter-cell calculations or formulae. I opted instead for a table within a bog standard word-processing package, on the grounds that pretty well everybody can use one of those, and most computers come with a compatible one already installed. The alphanumeric and numeric sort functions could deal with names and dates, provided I turned the dates into pseudo decimals, such as 2010.09 for September 2010. The different locations could be accommodated by a simultaneous secondary sort instruction, probably numeric (a simple kit 1 and kit 2).

Cracked it this morning, and started entering the data: a tedious business. Boy, do medicines have strange names! There is no obvious relationship between the names and what they do, as far as I can see, and certainly no relationship between names and the active ingredients. The chief research, if not the most costly, in drug companies, must be pseudo-lexical invention. Wouldn't mind doing a bit of that myself, if the money was right.

This afternoon I am off to the lifeboat station with my computer to try out on the cox whether it is easy for somebody else to understand. The trouble is, he is as sharp as a razor. More than I can say for all the crew, but he'll have to do.