Somebody worked a stall for a day and came back with a sheet of paper. Eighty names in different hands, some in a hurry, photographed three times on a phone in poor light because nobody scans anything at an exhibition.
This is the least glamorous data in any business and it is also the freshest. Those people asked to be contacted. A week later half the value has evaporated.
What came out
Eighty raw entries were read off the photographs. Three were the same person written twice and got merged. One was genuinely illegible and was dropped rather than guessed at. Seventy-six went in.
Each one carried a confidence rating: 57 high, 19 medium. Not a score for decoration — a medium-confidence phone number is one somebody should glance at before dialling, and marking it says so.
The part that surprises people
Nothing was sent. Not one message was drafted, let alone transmitted. The record says so explicitly.
The job was to turn paper into a list somebody can work. Deciding who to contact, and what to say to a person who spoke to you at a stall, is a different job with different judgement in it. Running them together is how a business ends up sending a stranger something that reads like it came from a machine, because it did.
Why this small one is worth writing up
Because it is the shape of most real work. Not a transformation programme — a sheet of paper, an afternoon, and a question of whether the result can be trusted enough to act on.
The answer is yes, on three conditions: it tells you how sure it is, it declines to guess when it cannot read something, and it stops at the point where judgement starts. Take away any one of those and you have eighty rows that somebody has to check by hand anyway.