Chandler's job on Friends

Cafe Society
1

I missed the very beginning on 1/9, but I guess Chandler quit his job. At the end, Monica said something about wanting him to find a job he loved, not doing “statistical analysis and data reconfiguration.” Chandler cried out that she finally figured out what he did after he quit.

So, what exactly is statistical analysis and data reconfiguration? It was always implied Chandler made good money, and he seemed to be pretty far up the corporate ladder. What companies use SA and DR? Did he work for a dot-com?

2

I do Statistical Analysis. I work for a manufacturing company. I don’t “reconfigure” my data though. Not sure what that means.

I’m a Six Sigma Black Belt, if that means anything to anyone.

3

Ooh! Ooh! I know . . . sort of. IIRC, it’s something like ISO 9000 certification. I read about it in the last few management textbboks I proofread.

It’s been mentioned that Chandler worked in “data processing [for] a large multinational corporation” (so probably not a dot-com); maybe “data reconfiguration” refers to reorganizing databases?

4

Okay, what you guys just said? Like the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons…“Bwaa bwaa bwa, bwaa bwah.”

I sucked at math. Can you use words of one syllable so my number challenged brain can wrap around it?

5

Well, a database is simply a collection of data. It can be as simple as your grocery list on the back of an envelope, or as complicated as customer records for Amazon.com, all cross-referenced and accessible by customer number, address, zip code, date, last name, and so on. If my guess about “data reconfiguration” is right, it could mean writing your list in order to match your route up and down the grocery store aisles, or it could mean changing how Amazon.com’s customer info is organized in the computer.

I’ll let someone else explain Six Sigma, ISO 9000, TQM, and all that junk.

6

He analyses the WENUS and the ANUS.

7

OK,

I hadn’t taken a math course since high school before I got into this.

I’m an IT person.

I look at an IT process. Something that is measureable. Say, for instance, the amount of time a system spends down.

I measure it. I statistically figure out how good the measurement system is by measuring it different ways. In some cases, this isn’t as necessary. But you have to know that your measurement is accurate if you are going to make good decisions. Think about it this way - you are on a diet - is your scale accurate? Do you use the same scale each time? Do you always go barefoot when you weigh yourself?

Then I establish the current statistics for the process. What is the average (mean) length of an outage? What is the Mean Time Between Failure? If I graph the length of outages, what does it look like? Review the process, and begin analyzing the process (using statistics again) for process improvements. For instance, we discover that statisically the system is most likely to be down longer on the weekend, because there isn’t anyone here to go reboot it if it goes down and someone needs to drive in. (This is an obvious example - lots of times we are digging deeper for this stuff). Than we statistically figure out how much down time we’d save, how much money that translates to, and how much it would cost, to staff 24x7 so we always have someone here to kick a box. We probably also go back to “root cause” – i.e. why is the system going down in the first place - can we prevent the outage completely? And statistically analyze that. Go back to the weight example - what do you weigh now? Do you weigh more at certain times of the month or after the holidays? What is your current process for maintaining your weight? What can we change in your process (skip the Snickers bar? Take a walk every day? Switch to diet pop?) Which of these would do the most good for the least cost (We discover that most of your excess calories are in pop, not snacking, so you switch to diet pop or water…and we also discover that you used to park a block and a half further away and you are walking less - so now you take a walk on your breaks).

Once we make the improvement, we remeasure and see whether we actually “improved” anything at all.

Businesses are sometimes guilty of “shoot, point, aim.” They start fixing a problem before they have any good idea of what the problem even is, how pervasive the problem is, and how much the problem is actually costing them. Statistical analysis is used to try and pin this down a little so we have fewer pointy haired bosses running around making decisions based off of bad (or no) actual data. In the case of the system being down, some VP will declare that we will staff on weekends based on fallout from a single incident, we hire, and then discover that the system being down on Saturday is really only a problem when the execs are getting ready for their big quarterly meeting, otherwise, we could turn out the lights Friday afternoon and no one would care, and it would have been far cheaper to just have someone work the weekend once a quarter and comp them a couple of days than to actually hire someone.

As to Chandler’s job - my guess is that it was “screenwriter speak” and the screenwriter has very little idea of what Chandler actually does. He sits in an office and does something with data.

8

I’m not a huge Friends watcher, but my understanding is that the lack of clear definition of what Chandler does (did, since he quit his job) is sort of a running joke. He does something boring with data. Any more detail than that would be assumed to be even more boring.

9

He’s a transponster.

At least, according to Rachel.

10

I would imagine that whatever Chandler’s job was, it had something to do with TPS reports.

11

Fiddlesticks, I was gonna say that!

As an IT person with a degree in math, I was always a little offended when they made fun of Chandler’s job. But since he paid the bills, they let him stay around, I guess. :wink: