My firm hired four inexperienced actuaries. That increases our basic pricing team from three to seven and I get to have a hand in their education. To make room for this gaggle of new proto-actuaries we’re shuffling some existing people into offices that are now empty. Their time there will be comparatively brief; we’ll be moving into a new office space with very few private offices in about six months, but for now some group gets to have their tiny domains.

Since the move in has happened, I’ve noticed two changes:
1) They spend most of the time with their office doors closed. This suggests to me, that given the opportunity for privacy, they will take it.
2) They ask people to swing by their offices. I’m not entirely sure where this tendency comes from. It could be a subtle observation that the person leaving their office has a tiny amount more walking to do vs someone who just goes to threshold of their fief. It come be a tiny tyranny. It could be trying the phrase on for size.

I hope the latter fades quickly. In the mean time, I’ll enjoy the quieter work place.

The move to an open office plan is not one I meet gladly. My current tactic is to accumulate enough monitors to block out intrusions and bathe myself is soft warm light. I have some pack ratting to do.

Reinsurance often only applies to losses above a certain size.  For pricing, clients will often provide a large lost listing that consists of all losses among a certain amount.  Large losses often include some detail about the loss and today I reviewed a set of lost listings for a school board insurance policy.  When teachers screw up, the school board is inevitably sued and this creates some novel listings:
1) A teacher was sued for running an escort service out of the school with students as the workers.
2) A teacher was sued for convincing a physically handicapped kid to play dodgeball where upon he then had the crap knocked out of him as a handicapped kid playing dodgeball.

I’m still not very useful at work and I completely recognize this.  My normal tactic is to just kind of ignore my ignorance and plug along anyway.  Today I was asked to do some time sensitive work and began plugging away.  After a few hours I was told that I was taking too long but that something else important had to be done and someone would take over for what I was doing.  The task I was asked to do was trivial and once again I felt like head bee guy.

Me: Hi.
Coworker: Today is your last day before you leave for surgery, correct?
Me: Yes. I’ll be out for two weeks.
Coworker: Our manager indicated that I should hug you because you and I went to school together. I do not think that would be appropriate so I would like to offer you a handshake. *holds out hand*.
Me: Thanks *shakes hand*
Coworker: May your recovery speed be a positive outlier in your favor.
I feel that last line should be the actuary’s blessing.

Taking a train to work has produced a new type of person in my life, the bystander.  I regularly see about three or four hundred different on the train and I see them just enough that I recognize their faces but not often enough to place them.  When I see one of these people, my brain tries to figure out who they are and how I know them.  Only recently has “train person” been added to my brain’s list of types.  This has made my rides home calmer as I no longer ask “who is that person” quite so much.

I also use an elevator bank at work and interact with another 40 each day that way.  There’s a part of my brain that feels like I should know these people’s lives or at least their names. That seemed aggressive, so since the new year, when someone hits an elevator button, I ask what happens on that floor.  This has worked for the last two weeks and breaks the silence of the elevator.  Today, I had a step back:

Me: So what’s on floor 25?
Him: Benefits consulting.  Just like it was yesterday, and just like it was when you asked me last week.
Me: Oh.

Maybe I need to write this down.

Twice a week my lunch break consists of me just walking around Center City Philadelphia.  During about a third of these walks, I pass a lunch cart on 16th Street that looks like standard hilal fare but for which the line seems to extend three times further than most other lunch cart lines.  I made a note of which cart it was and wanted to come back again another time when the line was shorter.  Today, I took lunch at quarter after 11, ran to the cart, ordered the chicken kabob and was met with a wholly unspectacular meal.  Why was the line so long?  Was there a massive craving for mediocre dry chicken in some unknown sauce served on meat spears?  Did I have strange tastes?  I had eaten at a mall food court and on the way back passed again the street the Amazing Cart was on and found out why my lunch may have been unimpressive.  I had gone to the wrong cart.  There were two hilal lunch carts and I had missed the one with the now massive line as it’s not visible from the north due to a news stand.  The thing you saw from my vantage was the massive line and nothing more.

I burn about 400 less calories each day at my current workplace compared to where I worked before and my weight loss has ceased.  Standing at an Instron has been replaced by spreadsheets and walking across the building to bullshit has been replaced by yet more spreadsheets.  My solution was to build a  standing desk from the design I found here and I raided an Ikea to get the parts to assemble one.  Yesterday evening I assembled the stand and today I brought it onto the Regional Rail line to get it to work.  The day after Christmas saw light traffic and few people gave me guff about the snow plow/censor box that I had held around my waste to keep it from moving in the jangling train.  I then walked it through Suburban Station, past the clothespin, up an escalator, and into an elevator.  Placed upon my desk, here it is:

2012-12-26 10.55.31

The desk didn’t quite prove to be tall enough so I propped it up with reams of paper.  The laptop to the left is held up with a 10 ream paper box and things seemed pretty comfortable for the first three hours or so.

Then I made a critical miscalculation by putting on these:

2012-12-26 12.20.54-1

I had meant to try ice skating at the UPenn rink earlier, but this was the first day I had scheduled the time to do so.  I had stood for three hours then went ice skating for two.  The benches on the SEPTA car have never proven more comfortable.

The rest of the day passed without much pain but I was quite glad to again sit when I took the train home.

 

My offices uses Microsoft Lync but turns off message logging for “security reasons”.  This frustrates me to no end as conversation logging is infinitely useful when one works with people who will write three or four paragraph IMs with important information in lieu of an email.  A coworker and I installed Pidgin to deal with this lack of logging and it was nice to have a unified messaging platform on my computer.  The coworker and I chatted and explored the fuller functionality of Pidgin like logging, psychic mode, and showing previous conversations but slowly our chatter became more informal as we both reminisced about using Pidgin in college.  This was fine, but the breaking point came after we picked apart the hair and clothing choices of our coworkers and I linked him to hahgay.com.  This site is profoundly useful but probably in violation of my firm’s diversity policy.

1) I removed Pidgin.
2) I deleted the Pidgin conversation log.
3) I now understand why logging is disabled.

 

Crucial to the actuarial craft is estimating how losses will develop.  Say someone gets in a car accident, it’s easy to figure out how much fixing the car will cost but it can take years for all the costs of an injury to come to light.  If a firm has enough history, you can calculate a loss development to pull those losses forward based on loss data but often the data can be spare so one has to use another method.  One of the most popular is the Bornhuetter-Ferguson method often abbreviated to “BF method”.

This creates an odd scenario:

Coworker #1: The paucity of data makes LDF selection tenuous.
Coworker #2: I think we should go with the BF value I selected.
Coworker #1: Your BF is poorly supported.
Coworker #2: My BF is better than yours, I think.

I’m glad my grown coworkers get to argue about who has a better BF.  I really wanted to chime in with “which of your BFs brought you flowers most recently?”

I’m participating in a Secret Santa at work.  The format is 3-4 small gifts of no more than $5.00 and one final large one.  I requested mechanical pencils and almonds.  So far I have received two sets of chocolate despite listing “no sweets please” on my Secret Santa request form.  Today I received another gift drop and it was a pencil sharpener.  The colors are very nice, but I don’t think they’ll work well with my mechanical pencils.