The Stats You Keep

Years ago I was counting at an inventory for some outdoors retailer. They sold a lot of fishing, camping, hiking merchandise, a lot of basic outdoor and nature stuff. At one point near the end of inventory count I ended up counting inside this one kiosk in the fishing department. Behind the counter they had giant spools of fishing wire for us to count. Luckily for me the store had already precounted the fishing wire for us, all I had to do was scan a few barcodes on a precount sheet and enter in the quantity that the store had precounted. The store however had tons of fishing wire, and apparently each inch of fishing wire was considered a quantity unit. The precount sheet only had 4 barcodes for me to scan, but the quantities listed were ridiculously huge. The first barcode, had a quantity somewhere in the 300,000's, the second barcode was at least 100,000 "pieces", and the last 2 barcodes each had quantities in the tens of thousands. At the end I had over 500,000 pieces in my area. I filled out my area ticket with my piece count and then I saw an area manager nearby, I yelled over to her and asked what the APH goal was for that day. She said it was about 1100 pieces per hour, which at that point I showed her my area ticket displaying a half million pieces and she laughed. I responded by saying "Fishing wire". Four and a half years later, I'm attending a 2 day meeting at the corporate office of Quantum Services, who I had just started working for. One by one each person who worked at the corporate office stood up and spoke to us about working for their company. I don't remember a lot of the stuff that was said, though there were a few good speakers. One person I do remember talked about the concept of productivity, at one point he utterred the phrase "What gets measured, gets impacted". This phrase I can't forget, mainly because I find there to be a great deal of truth to it.


If you spend any amount of time working for any external inventory service, the one thing you will never get away from is the concept of the average per hour, the amount of merchandise (wheather it be pieces or money) that you can count per hour. Obvisously the APH, and the manhours spent doing the inventory are important factors in determining the cost of an inventory. In order to control the manhours spent on any inventory, the auditing company must communicate very clearly the APH goal for that inventory. It needs to put that benchmark out there for counters to attempt to achieve. It may also need to take additional measures to ensure that the APH goal is being met which may include offering an incentive for counters to reach their goal. In many cases the incentive can simply be better pay. Jack Henry warned about the dangers of this type of scenerio, on the History of Inventory link, he is quoted as saying:

"If the service has no built-in checks and balances, such as spot- counters, a pay scale based upon production is detrimental to your company. Such a system begs for mass estimation by unethical auditors"

Such systems do exist, and have been used very recently. RGIS not too long ago came up with a program called the EAPH. This program basically predetermined your "expected" APH (hence, EAPH) for each inventory, and kept track of how much your actual counting average come in above or below your EAPH. Of course the EAPH was based on only one factor and that was your pay rate. Thus at $10.00/ hr your EAPH would be at a certain level. At $10.15/hr, the EAPH would be a little higher, at $10.25/hr a little higher still and so on and so on. If you constantly counted above your EAPH you would be bumped up to a higher pay rate, if you constantly fell below your EAPH, then your pay rate would be reduced. Even though RGIS has stopped using this system, it did serve several purposes during it's implementation, one it readjusted the pay rate for people who the company probably thought were overpayed, and two it gave counters a real incentive to pull a good APH on each inventory they did. No longer was a good APH merely about making profits for some faceless corporate hotshots up in Detroit, now your APH had a financial impact on your own wallet.

In terms of inventory counting though how does one go about obtaining a number when it comes to APH? How does one purposely go out and achieve a APH of $12,000 per hour, or of 800 pieces per hour. How does one achieve this particular level of this statistic while in the act of counting a store's inventory? I suppose there are many different approaches one could take to accomplish this goal. One could attempt to master the techniques and nuances of counting like handkeying to the point where one is able to develop actual ability in terms of being able to count fast. There are people, believe it or not, who do have legitimate talent when it comes to inventory counting, and who can achieve their APH goal with their talent along with some applied effort. Counters with a great deal of experience are probably most able to do this. For others who may not have as much talent, nor the desire to put in the hard work neccessary, they have the ability to "cheat", cut corners, to utilize the techniques of profitable counting. In the most extreme cases counters will employ immoral measures like plugging number in order to achieve a good APH. When a counter "gloss counts" a box of candy, they probably have a lot of reasons for doing it, but mainly they do it in order to maintain a good APH. They know that taking the time to count it accurately would negatively affect their APH,so they try to estimate here and there to minimize the damage counting this area would do. The notion of counting candy does bring up another approach to take in order to achieve a good APH. Counters don't have to cheat in order to reach their APH goal, as my "Fishing wire" example proves sometimes a good APH isn't about how you count, as much as it is about what you count.

If you tried to think about all the factors that might effect a person's APH, there could be literally dozens of different things that play into what your APH eventually becomes at the end of the count. Below is a few of the more common factors.

--One's talent, ability and work ethic
Even if we were able to keep all other factors constant, or possibly negliable, the fact of the matter is that invariably some people are going to count faster than others. Counting at the core still requires some physical ability to do the work, and some people are just going to be more adapt at performing the work than others. Apart from the notions of ability, there's also the aspect of one's work ethic, some people are more willing to put in the work that the job demands and this can affect one's APH to some degree. No matter what everyone's APH eventually becomes, one has to consider that not all counters are created equal.

--One's Experience
Apart from the basic natural ability at the job, one's experience or accumulated knowledge can affect APH. When counting a grocery store for the first time, one might not very fast due to being unfamiliar with the merchandise, however by the time you've done hundreds of grocery stores, counting the merchandise offers few challenges that one hasn't already seen before. Over time one will learn the 'tricks of the trade' if you will and find ways to deal with counting certain sections of the store. The experience factor can also be related to the way one is able to use the counting equipment, being comfortable with a counting machine and knowing how to use it can certainly affect one's APH. Becoming a fast counter often doesn't happen overnight, in many cases it occurs over a long time and alot of stores.

--One's physical and mental state of mind
Ultimately you would want counters to be 100% healthy, but most of the time this isn't the case. When you consider that this job at times can involve handkeying on a counting machine for hours at a time, incidences of carpel tunnel are not foreign to inventory counting. Not to mention that inventory counting is essentially 'field work", it's going to involve a lot of standing, strecthing, bending over, sitting down, and so forth and the body does incur some punishment from time to time. As for the mental side, well I can't say from experience that everybody who counts inventories, is happy and content. It's hard work, for very little pay, and little respect, the mood and mindset of counters is not always going to be positive, and this can certainly affect the way they work. It should also be mentioned that sometimes this job requires working some insane hours, I've worked plenty of day shifts following night shifts and the lack of sleep in between stores can certainly be a factor towards APH.

--The sections of the store one winds up counting
The "Fishing Wire" story is a great, albeit extreme, example of this idea in action. In any given store not all areas are created the same. Some sections can and will significantly boost your APH when you do them, conversely some sections can slow you down and deflate you APH. The strategy of some counters who want to achieve a high APH is to find the sections that will boost their APH and count them, while avoiding the mucky, tough to count sections that will hurt their APH. This phenomeon is called 'cherry-picking', and usually 'cherry-pickers' are not held in high regard by counters who get relagated to counting the hard-to-count sections. In financial inventories (which mainly tend to be grocery stores) 'cherry-pickers' will tend to look for expensive stuff to count like, cigarettes, liquor and alcohol, maybe even HBA, while trying to avoid counting cheap items things like candy, or spices, or canned soup. In a barcode inventory, finding the APH boosting areas may be a bit more difficult. A cherry picker, would probably need to find an area with a lot of pieces that is organized enough so that it can be counted fairly quickly. One definitive possibility would be areas where one is able to enter in their own quantities, generally called "multi-count" areas. This gives a counter a huge advantage in regards to APH over a counter who only counts "auto-quantity" areas, where a counter has to scan each piece. Another good area for cherry-pickers are precount sheets, these essentially allow them to input a bunch of numbers without actually 'physically' counting any merchandise.
--The level of organization with the store
An example of an area that would kill an APH, might be an area that is cluttered, dense, and/or poorly organzied. Granted some things are always going to be hard to count, but then there's some stores that will do their own job of increasing the degree of difficulty. If you spend enough time counting, you'll find out that some stores are just 'easier' to count. And if you're someone concerned with accuracy, or you find yourself in a situation where accuracy is highly important, then a crammed, disorganized section of merchandise will definetly slow your down. Store prep can also be a factor, a clothing retailer can actually affect APH by doing some simple things like pulling the barcode tags out for easier access for scanning, or by making sure as many items are tagged as possible. Every SKU check a counter has to call for, will slow him down affecting his APH. And apart from Ashleyesque counters, most counters will have a limit to how often they call for help.
--The team that one works with
If some counters in a store wind up cherry-picking and other counters wind up getting bogged down in tough, densely packed, and disorganized areas, you could examine peoples APH's at the end of the count and see that the cherry-pickers counted more than the other counters, and conclude that the cherry-pickers did a better job. That type of conclusion would be almost too simplistic, for one it would ignore the factors that caused the APHs to end up being what they were, it would also ignore the notion that each counter ended up counting a different set of sections. In any inventory that involves a team of counters, every counter will encounter a different portion of the store to count, and this will effect one's APH. Let's say that counter A counts 1500 pieces an hour doing his set of sections called "D", and counter B counts 1200 pieces an hour doing his set of sections called "E". One could argue that counter A is faster than counter B, or that the set of sections "D" is either easier to count, or more condusive to higher APHs than the set of sections "E". Trying to determine which of these conclusions is true is not easy, and it may differ from situation to situation, and in many cases the ultimate truth may lie somewhere in between these two conclusions. But not only is each counter dealing with their unique portions of the store, but (baring recounts of course) each area is only counted by one counter in each inventory. Every area that a certain counter counts prevents anybody else working in that same inventory from doing that area. Any area another counter counts is an area you will not count in an inventory, thus there exists a notion that everybody's APHs are not independent of each other, that they're all inter-connected. If a counter counts a really tough area that slows him down, he'll probably see his APH decrease, but on the other hand he may also be helping the APH of everyone else, because he keeps them from doing that area. On the other hand a counter who cherry-picks and takes a lot of easy to count areas, may boost his average, but at the same time makes it difficult for others to increase their APH because they may get relagated to counting more difficult areas. For a cherry-picker to truly avoid counting a tough area they ultimately need someone else to count it. If you want to have a high APH you're better off working with "grinders" than you are working alongside cherry-pickers.

But of course counters don't usually get to pick who they work with, nor do they have a lot of control over how a store is organized. In some situations a counter may not even get to decide what sections to count in a store. A counter's APH may ultimately depend on factors that the counter has absolutely no control of. In many cases an auditing company manager can affect a person's APH by assigning them to count specific sections. In RGIS' current incentive scheme, counters are divided into classes based upon their APH. Some audit supervisors I've worked with feel the need to protect counters in the highest class, the "top-guns", by assigning to count areas that boost thier APH. One supervisor I've worked with once said that "in the old days, you weren't allow to cherry-pick, now you have to", in some case counters are specifically told to cherry-pick. But the notion of uncontrollable factors can show up in many different situations. During my days with Quantum I spent some time doing inventory counts working solo. When you work by yourself obvisouly the team you work with is nonexistant, so it's not a factor at all, plus you really can't cherry-pick because you're gonna have to count it all anyway, so what you count isn't much of a factor either. But the state of the store was still a factor and at times a pretty sizable one. Granted some stores were more organized than others and thus easier to count. But beyond that some stores had alot more merchandise than others did, and the type of merchandise that constituted their inventory at times really made a difference in my APH. I noticed after some time that the stores that had a ton of cigarettes where usually the stores were I put up the biggest APHs. Over a span of about 3 months, I did 75 inventory counts by myself and kept records of my APH and the number of cigarettes counted at each one.  In the preceding post you can see the data itself.  For the sake of science I measured the correlation of these two variables and ended up with a correlation coefficient of 0.77, which indicated a significant relationship between these two variables. In general most of my best APHs came in stores that carried a ton of cigarettes. In fact my best APH of all just happened to occur in the same store that also carried the most amount of cigarettes. The strange thing about all this was my overall counting style never really changed all that much, from one inventory to the next. It's not as if I did something special or radically different at the inventory where I counted $34,704 per hour, the main difference at this store was the high volume of cigarettes, my high APH wasn't the result of anything that I had any control over. Nor was it the result of any drastic changes on my part.

Based on the dataset my overall average of all these store was $19,685 per hour. But obviously there's a lot of variation from store to store, clearly I'm not counting $19,685 per hour at every single store, and this variation is mainly caused by outside factors. So what type of counter am I? Am I a fast counter who sometimes gets bogged down in some stores, or am I a slow, meticulous counter who can occasionally get a major boost from some stores? In their excellent book "The Numbers Game" the authors, Blastland and Dilnot spent a chapter discussing the trouble with averages. One of the themes expressed in that chapter was the idea that an average doesn't display the variation that exists behind it's creation. My overall counting average may be $19,685, but clearly I don't count this fast at every store I go to. And if I count $34,704 per hour in a store, this does not mean that I'm counting $34,704 every single hour on the hour. If I spend an hour counting $68,000 in cigarettes, and wind up with a APH of 23000, then obviously I spent the rest of the day destroying my APH counting the rest of the store. In some stores maybe my APH does stay more constant over time, but if I wind up in "Fishing Wire", then it'll skyrocket to a utterly ridiculous level. These types of variation get lost when one simply looks at the APH.

All that an APH says is that you counted this much merchandise in this amount of time. An APH can tell you the end result, but not how you got there. The path one takes to an high APH is probably more interesting to examine then the destination. Along the way many factors, including some of the ones I mentioned above, will show up to either boost my average or destroy it. Also how do we interpret a statistic about a counter, when there exists factors affecting the value of this statistic for which a counter has no control over. There may be things about the way a counter works that don't get conveyed by the APH. Probably the biggest problem with statistics is that no one statistic can explain everything. The correlation between cigs and productivity does appear to be a strong relationship, but it's not a perfectly linear relationship, there were still other factors at play in determining my APH. One can not obtain total knowledge about a person or an object on the basis of one statistic. With each statistic there exists a limitation of knowledge, it will reveal some information, but not everything that can be known about the subject matter. This limitation arises out of the complexity of factors that contribute to the occurance of this statistic. It's not that statistics lie or mislead, it's really a case of them being incomplete . All statistics are incomplete. An APH can say that I counted $34,000 per hour, but it says nothing about how I pulled it off, an APH is not a complete measure of an inventory counter.

But here it really doesn't matter that statistics may be incomplete, or that they don't tell the whole story. The idea behind the APH is not to determine who the best counter is, or in determining how one counts, the APH has a different purpose. Here statistics are not being used to try and measure any great truths, but rather they were being used to persuade a specific counting style. It's purpose is to generate productivity among the counters, to get them to count in a cost efficient manner. It is the sole basis for determining what type of counter you get classified as, and for how people judge you. I've met people who will disparage someone solely on the basis of their APH. I had dinner with a manager from Quantum once, and I brought up a counter who I had worked with briefly several months ago, and her first thought was "he doesn't count very fast, I don't know what I'm going to do with him". You know his accuracy, his integrity towards the job, his work ethic, his personality, what kind of guy he was, none of that mattered, the first thought that came to mind was about his APH, and that seemed to define her attitude towards him, and it definitely did not seem to be a positive attitude at that as well. In the same dinner this manager would also talk favorably about counters who were able to count 4 stores in a day working solo. But the importance of one's APH and of how fast one counts is nothing new, this concept has been around probably as long as external inventory counting has.

Even when I was relatively new to the inventory counting trade, APHs were very important. A few months after I starting counting inventories, I remember doing a store, where on the trip down to the store, our area manager claimed that it would only take about 2 or 3 hours for us to count it. Well long story short, the store took a little longer than expected and we were there about 5 hours. When everything was done, and everybody was back in the van at the end of the day, our area manager got in made sure all the doors were closed and then just screamed at us because we were way to slow. He made sure to mention that a smaller crew had done that same store in less time on the previous count. One counter who was with us had the audacity to ask how our accuracy was. At this our manager calmed down considerably and said it was okay, but you could tell that this offered hardly any consolation whatsoever. He was extremely angry at how we counted, and he made that clear to every single one of us in the best way he could, though a fit of rage. On the Misfit's blog there are numberous examples of how important APHs are to the world of RGIS. During one stretch of "Batch? Natch" he writes:

"...the DM would print up a list of how many dollars everyone had counted in the previous inventory, make copies, and pass them out at the beginning of the next day's inventory. Of course, if you batched, your APH would be much higher than someone who counted legitimately. Printing out our APHs was supposed to be a sort if incentive for us to count faster, as in "Hey! So-and-So counted $90,000.00 worth of stuff, and I only did half that. Gosh! I had better count faster this time, so I can do as well as him!"
I also remember another instance back when I was just starting out when a group of us where traveling home from a store. Our area manager (hint: the same one as before) started asking how much each of us had counted. He asked one of my co-workers, and she replied with a dollar amount somwhere around $100,000 or so. He then asked me, and I just shrugged and said that I didn't know. I honestly was never one to keep track of how much I counted or how fast I was going during an inventory. For me keeping track of your APH while you were counting is a bit of a distraction. I have always felt more comfortable not knowing my APH during a count, for me I prefer to focus on the job at hand which is counting the merchandise. Judging by the Misfit's quote and my personal experience auditing companies for the most part don't agree with my approach. For them increasing counter productivity is an extremely important goal. So important that they won't wait until the inventory end to let you know that your average needs to be higher. RGIS especially have stressed the importance of constantly monitoring one's APH. At one store I did for RGIS, I remember a manager literally going around asking everyone what their APH was during the count. Every couple of seconds it was the same phrase echoing over and over again "What's your APH?".... "What's your APH?"........."What's your APH?", and so on and so on. Sometimes she would inject some feedback indicating that the counter needed to pick it up. I've always wondered though, wheather constantly being aware of one's APH during an inventory count is a good thing, does knowing your APH at all times actually help a counter work faster RGIS clearly puts a heavy focus on APH. So much so that they don't seem to care about how one counts. They care more about the end result, and not how one gets there. As long as you hit your APH goal, RGIS is happy, and they probably could care less how you did it. With APHs, its more about the ends, then it is about the means. But consider what it takes to actually count the merchandise. It takes some level of focus and concentration when dealing with the merchandise in order to maintain a certain pace to your work. Does stopping to check your progress help or hurt your ability to maintain this pace? Is it a source of inspiration or a distraction?

The idea that stopping to check one's stats could be a distraction is not without merit. In other walks of life where performance is measured similar ideas have been expressed. A professional archery teacher from New Zealand named Tim Strickland was quoted many years ago as saying

"Nothing interferes with performance like concentrating on the goal rather the process of one's game"

He further adds:
"If your technique is correct, the target never enters your mind. It's just there to catch your arrows."

Can a Stricklandesque approach work in inventory counting? Maybe the idea isn't to go towards a high APH, but rather to have a high APH come to you. Perhaps it's better to master the techniques and tricks of trade in inventory couting to a point where a high APH practically occurs naturally, instead of efforting towards a high APH through strategic maneovuring. A golf instructor, named Dr. Richard Coop included the Strickland quote in his book "Mind Over Golf", and in a very interesting chapter on concentration recalls a round of golf with Michael Jordan weeks following a playoff game in which he scored 63 points against the Celtics. He said that Jordan admitted to being in a such a zone of confidence and concentration in that game, he felt unstoppable. Dr. Coop writes:
"He recalled that he hadn't been aware of the game score or how many points he was accumulating. Jordan had been lost in the process of his game. He was doing, not thinking...."

This quote reminds me something a DM with RGIS said when I first started working as an inventory counter, at a training session he said "Don't take this the wrong way, but you have to try and not think too much when you do this." I can understand what my DM was saying. Inventory counting is something one does. You don't have the luxury to stop and think, or to be very contemplative or reflective. Once an inventory starts "it's go time". It's also a fairly simple job to do. Now I'm not saying that counting is easy, merely that it's not a real complex thing to do. You don't nned to think too much to figure out how many widgets are sitting on a shelf, in a lot of cases you just look at what's there, maybe move the merchandise around a bit and then enter the data into your machine. It's not that you'll never need to think in this job, but when you do you have to think efficiently. Everything you do in this line of work has to be done within the parameters of a certain pace or rhythm.
Every so often I'll hear counters talk about getting in a good rhythm when counting, and once a counter gets into a rhythm while counting, they usually want to stay there, mainly to keep their APH up. In his book Dr. Coop also talks about the notion of zanshin, the Japanese word for unbroken concentration or a state of total concentration towards an activity or project. Dr. Coop ultimately dismisses this idea for golfers because of all the downtime that exists between shots in golf. But in counting this idea may not be all that crazy, for one counting is designed to be more of a continuous activity, one that doesn't lead very well to intermissons, stoppages, or breaks (even though breaks are required by law in some situations). Inspite of all the legal trouble inventory companies have had with breaks, I've actually met counters who honestly don't like taking breaks in some situations. Stopping to monitor one's APH, can break that zone of concentration when you're in such a rhythm. To stay in rhythm one is best served to stay focus on the process, and not the end goal (or the product). Monitoring one's APH could become a distrcation that keeps someone from getting lost in the "doing" portion of the job. The best way to get away from the goal orientated mindset is to focus in on the here and now, to take a micro view of things. A golfer probably wouldn't want to walk up to the first tee, thinking about shooting a low round, or about breaking par, but rather where they want their first tee shot to land. In a similar vein a counter shouldn't focus on achieving a certain APH, they should focus on getting through "their portion" of the store in the best possible way. For all the talk about APH, essentially a counter has to "play the course". But what makes counting interesting is that (apart from solo counts) one's course is not predetermined and it's something that can develop outside of their control. The course that one plays depends alot on the supervisor and one's co-workers. Can knowing your APH be a source of inspiration? Maybe but once you get stuck on a course how much inspiration can it offer.

But wheather the constant vigilance of one's APH works or not, the end game here is ultimately about one's productivity. Going back to the opening quote "What gets measured, gets impacted".  Perhaps what a company like RGIS is really after isn't so much the measure, but rather the impact. With the APH, you're instilling in a counter how important it is to be productive when counting, and it showcases how much you value people who can be very productive. In some ways the values that a company has, or the values that it thinks are the most important, can be seen in the stats they keep and in the stats they don't. This is especially true in cases where statistics are used more for the impact that they could have. The APH mainly is of value to the company that employs counters, and nto really to the clients themselves. The APH's aim is to bring people closer to the Bradleyesque style of counting. And it's not just a company statistic, it's THE statistic. It is the single, lone measure of a counter. The Misfit's account above seems to describe the notion that some auditing companies want to turn inventory counting into some type of contest or a sport, to see who can count the fastest. The concept of counting as a sport to me is a dangerous one. Inventory counting should be a team effort towards providing a service to a client, not about having counters engaged in an internal contest to see who can best excell in regards to one lone metric. A metric that is primarily concerned with speed. But what about other qualities of inventory counting; accuracy, integrity, thoroughness. How do these concepts get impacted, because they sure don't get measured?
The APH focus is essentially a focus towards productivity and profitability. Is this all there is to work, one has to perform the job in a way as to make the most money? Are we in some ways just slaves to numbers? Is the whole point of work merely to turn out profits for the companies we work for? If the answer is yes, this seems to be a pretty dim view of inventory counting, although it would not alone in the dark. A lot of moments in life seem to be about trying to achieve some quantative level of success. Our salary is a measure of how successful we are, the grades we get in school indicates how smart we are. Units sold is a measure of how popular a certain commodity is. And so on, eventually we end up judging everything based upon these measures. But does what does this do to the way we look at things, does our perception of things get skewed towards the stats we keep. Are the best movies the ones with the better box office number? Are the best TV shows the ones with the best ratings?, are the best websites the ones with the most "hits? And what about the things that aren't measured. Or even the things that can't really be measured at all, the "intangibles" as some will call them. I suppose it would be nice to have a measure that can quantative say this counter is accurate at this certain percentage. But such a measure would be difficult to capture, and in some cases almost impossible to tabulate. Then there's concepts like integrity which seem almost impossible to ever really quantify. The idea that we could "score" such a concept sound downright absurd.

If these things don't get measured how does this effect how we view a counter. What is the impact that of all this heavy APH focus. What types of counters are created as a result of this focus? Do our views about the quality of a counter skewed heavily towards the notion of speed? Is a faster counter necessarily a better counter? What exactly is a good, (or even a great) counter? How would we go about making such distinctions? There seems to be only one stat that we keep to make such distinctions.

If the nature of statistics is such that they can be incomplete and at times unable to properly measure certain qualities, then does there exist an understanding beyond mere statistical anaylsis? If statistics can't get the job done, what can we turn to to grasp the nuances of how one counts a store's inventory. One simple thing could be to just simply watch a counter work. Observing a counter in the act of doing their work, can probably allow one to better see that mysterious thing called one's counting style, and offer a better sense of how one goes about doing the job. I spent a little less than a year once working for a inventory service once. The owner of this company spent a lot of time, out in the field observing me work, seeing how I count, and to this day I have absolutely no doubt that this man has a far better conception of what type of counter I am then anyone who has spent time analyzing my APHs from an office building hundreds of miles away.