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Back to the Future False Alarms

Since my arrival in the False Alarm Reduction Unit, there have been many things that I have not understood and needed to learn.  Now that I am beginning to have a grasp on the job and what needs to be done, I am able to start finding answers to some of the items that bothered me but weren't of the highest priority.  One such item was a warning message that would pop up every day when I would process alarms. I have already discussed the system that we use in a previous post.  The message warned that alarms had already been processed for the day I was preparing to work on.  When I asked others in the office about the message, they couldn't give me an answer.  For them, it had "always" been that way and no one in the office (except me) thought anything of it or seemed to be bothered by it.  Of course, with so many other pressing matters, it would bother me for the time that it took to click the button to dismiss the warning, and then I would go about my day and forget about it until the next time I began the process.
Meanwhile, I had also noticed that at the bottom of the false alarm processing screen, there was a date way out in the future--in the year 2020 to be exact.  I thought that was rather strange, but I didn't know what that date represented.  I had a feeling that the two items were somehow connected but I hadn't figured out what that connection might be.
Last week, I decided to do some research.  While reading the CryWolf® manual, I discovered that the date circled in red below should be the last date processed. 
This meant that an alarm from 2020 had already been processed.  Now, I don't believe that predicting the future is one of the features of CryWolf® so I decided to do a little research.  Normally, I run reports with the end date of "today" since no alarms will have been processed for any day after today since the alarms wouldn't have occurred yet.   This time I ran the report with an end date in 2030.  Sure enough, there was an alarm in 2020.  Actually, there were 5 alarms in the future.  I filed that information away and continued to read the manual.
Once you select the correct file for processing, the date you are working on should appear in the box circled in green below. The box circled in pink shows the number of alarms that need to be processed.
As you move through the alarms, the number below the pink circled box represents which alarm you are currently working on.
Next time that you are ready to process alarms, you should be able to easily see what day you last processed by checking the box circled in red above.  If the date is in the future, then there is a problem My future alarms turned out to be typos by someone in communications way back in 2008.  For 3 years, that annoying message had popped up daily and no one had followed up on it.  If you are new to a False Alarm Unit and there are things that you don't understand, I encourage you to keep asking questions until you get an answer.  Don't settle for "that's the way it has always been".  That is pretty good advice for life too.  
I will share how I fixed the date problem soon.  Be sure to check back. 
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