While I almost always prefer to focus on my areas of strength, there are a few areas of weakness that I'd like to address to some extent because I feel it would help in terms of credibility and make me a better tester and enable me to better collaborate with and understand other people.

For this reason I'm taking on some exercises to practice my thinking and raise my tolerance for tasks that I think of as "uninteresting" and mix them with things I do find interesting, like research.

So, I present to you the results of last weekend's training exercise. This is an excel spreadsheet that is a breakdown of household grocery expenses over the last 3 years. It also includes the national average adjusted for the cost of living in King County Washington (which is higher than much of the nation). Were I able to more easily find the data I'd compare against the costs of eating out because what this doesn't show is that I cook on average at least 10 times per week and only buy lunch 1-2 times per week at work. If the only goal were to lower the grocery bill, just eating out more often would do that, but it would also mean that food and beverage would consume more of our budget. I should also note that while most people get coffee out or go to the bar, we only do so about once per month, so the wine consumed at home is part of the grocery budget. What this chart also doesn't show is that when we first moved into the house we had never owned a home before and we had to buy many basics at the grocery store that were non-food household items. Those items tend to be expensive things like cleaning supplies, laundry detergent, cleaning tools, cooking utensils, and one time staples that are only replaced every so often. What looks like "waste" may not be. Yet most business decisions are made by this kind of "valid data". Creating data that is viewed as valid is very powerful. It needs to be "not wrong" and show how things are trending.



I also figured out that 10-40% of the average grocery budget in the United States is wasted (ends up being recycled or thrown out). For that reason I set my goal at 15% waste because to get it down to 10% might mean having to eat less healthy fresh foods and I'm not willing to sacrifice food quality to that extent to lower the grocery budget. According to the USDA Cost of Food at Home March 2009 data which is for the US $557.60 per month for a family of 2 between the ages of 19-50 years old.


To summarize, although I worry about how data and statistics are used in incomplete sets and often unintentionally are misleading (on occasion intentionally, but usually unintentionally), I still want to practice and learn more about statistics and practice building up my tolerance. If you have an exercise for me, a tutorial, or anything besides a book (I've read some books and now I need to practice), please drop me a line. If you want to mention more unintentional effects tracking only budget could have to prompt my thinking about unintended impacts of using such measurements feel free!

I've also learned something of interest about my personality. I started with this assignment because I tired of the casual complaint from Craig that the "grocery bill was too high". I now have presented data that shows not only has the bill been trending downwards while costs have been rising, but that his impression of the situation is stuck in the past. The grocery bill WAS too high in 2007 for good reason, but now in 2009 I expect him to apologize and tell me indeed we are stellar that despite eating out far less than the average Americans we have been so frugal as to beat the King Country average for 2 years running and as a result I deserve a pony as the sole person who does over 90% of the meal planning, cooking, and shopping. This my friends is one of the costs of dating a fellow nerd. You may get an email like this.