The Notch Graph

1988 - Daryl Armstrong invents the idea of getting a 'notch' for each day you abstain from drinking

1 January 1993 - Advent of the Notch Graph

'So what,' you may be asking, 'is the Notch Graph?'

Well, it was a plan to record everyone's notches, not as a competition, but just to see how everyone was doing.  The count began on 1 January 1993 with the following participants:

As can be inferred the Graph wasn't very complex and merely included a '1' for every day without a drink (a notch) and a '0' with a drink, plus some averages calculated because Excel could do it and I had a whim to do it.  I didn't know my very much about Excel back then, having only done a simple wage calculation spreadsheet in Lotus 123 in 1986 for use by the Victorian Chemical Co. One of the first things to be sorted out was the definition of a 'day'.  EASE had pointed out that you don't want to be at a party and suddenly have to stop at midnight just to avoid missing two notches in a row, so a day was defined as '8:00 AM to 8:00 AM'.  Another thing decided from the outset was that nicknames would be used instead of real names where available.  This probably stems from my fondness for nicknames but I don't actually remember why we decided this.  People persevered with keeping their figures updated and by the end of the year we had something that looked like this:

It was clear from this both CHERYL and EASE were going to blow out the stats so at the end of 1993 CHERYL was unceremoniously booted off the Graph.  EASE was allowed to stay but not without causing one of the most significant modifications in Notch Graph history, and one that was to make it more popular with people as time went on.

PC had raised the point that EASE was credited with not getting a notch for only maybe having a glass of wine with his dinner, whereas the same credit for not getting a notch was given to someone who'd been twelve hours on the piss and gotten home in a body bag.  It was resolved then to introduce a new classification and on 1 January 1994 the Session count began.  It's interesting to note that DUSTY is the person who came up with the idea of a notch in 1988.

But how to define the session?  One drink wasn't it, and we were accustomed to having two or three pots over the pub at lunchtime, so a session had to be more than that.  It had been my custom to have a night over at BRIAN and CHERYL's place in Ascot Vale where we would indulge in a few cans of Victoria Bitter while either watching a video or making increasingly stupid bets on the greyhounds.  But I could never drink more than eight cans of the stuff without getting violently ill.  Thus I somewhat arbitrarily determined that anything over eight drinks constituted a session.  And yet, there's this.  In order to differentiate a session from a drink, the session was given '-1' for a value.

In May 1994 I transferred from the ATO to the Department of Immigration, which meant that the Graph had to change from Excel to Lotus 123 format.  This was a bit of a learning curve for me as I had to remember what functions did what in Lotus and the syntax of each command.  But by the end of the year we had the following:

Note that some people stayed out of the session system.  The YEARLY figure there should be regarded as erroneous as it's based on a comparison with the current number of days in the year and how many notches, drinks and sessions people had had so far.  The figures are thus based on a 4790-day year, and will need correction.  But since the Graph was now two years old, there was room for comparison between 1993 and 1994.  STRIKE had gone to New Guinea in September and was unfortunately killed while over there.  He's a sad loss, but his six word review of Flatliners, 'Altered States, Altered States, Altered States' will stand forever.

On 9 May 1994 I left Immigration because my eyesight was failing badly.  Nonetheless I was able to keep up the Graph by dint of lengthy phone calls and the amazing power of email  GUNGE had suggested that what people really wanted to see was a comparison, to show how each of them was going on any given day.  This required some way of selecting only that portion of the stats for a given period, based on where everyone had kept their records updated till (elegant turn of phrase, that).  The learning curve for this onc was steep, but I was up at Mum's and had a lot of time on my hands while my eyesight slowly got good enough to allow me to do more than stare at a screen with my nose almost touching it.

In 1995, the participants were:

This was the first Graph to include macros.  Although they didn't do anything, they were at least a step in complicating the Graph, which was becoming quite large by this time.  There were, however, a whole heap of formulae designed to give comparisons between the participants as they updated their details.  For example, =DCOUNT(OFFSET(Brian95,0,0,$L$74,),,BRIANNotch) included both the OFFSET function and referenced an Excel database (BRIANNotch referred to a set of criteria for determining a notch

Further, there were breakdowns by notches, drinks and sessions per month.

For some strange reason, the 1995 Notch Graph appears never to have been completed, but in September 1995 I returned to work, trying to pick up the shattered pieces of my job, and was introduced to the ATO Infoboard.  This led to the advent of IRC channel #Chermy and the Chermites of which we may speak later (when I can find out how to set up a webaite about them.).

The Graph continued on with very few changes from 1996

except that I introduced the FORECAST function to make predictions of future notches.

In 2001, HAWK introduced the idea of the gallon, which was when you actually drank a gallon of drinks.  This was invoked in the 2002 Graph.

On 1 September 2003 I had my last day at work and the Graph fell into a bit of a decline, as it took more effort than I was capable of to maintain it.  I had always had the dream of having a Graph linked to a personal spreadsheet for all the participants, and while this is technically possible using standard Excel (as opposed to XML tables etc) it wasn't possible in the ATO computer environment.  Former Commissioner Michael Carmody had no strong love of computers and wanted no truck with them, especially all this networking nonsense.  The ATO stands alone and there was no reason why its computers shouldn't do that as well.

On 2 June 2006 I officially retired from the ATO.  But it has been suggested that the Graph might continue via the Internet, something that I might look into given my huge amount of leisure time now.  But first, I have to find the completed versions of many of the graphs, because the ones I've been consulting to write this seem to end halfway through the year for some reason.

9 February 2007 - The Notch Graph officially ceases at Dave 'Ease' Ryder's retirement party at the Duke of Kent.

Future plans include putting all the Graphs up as XML files to allow further manipulations of the data by interested, hopelessly obsessive or merely bored persons.  After that, I may look at the Tipster of The Year graphs...