[Ham-Mac] Shortfall to Manual QSO Logging

[Dick Kriss]

A large envelope with 50+ cards showed up in the mail from the five-land
bureau.  Like everyone else I thumbed through the cards looking for a new
country.  No joy with new countries so I stared working on the cards with my
brown ARRL Spiral log books.  Yes, I am one of the dinosaurs that still logs
QSOs in the old fashion way.  The exception is contests logs that are stored
on the computer hard drive with manual note of the contest name and date in
the brown log book.

This has worked good for me since 1976 and I am still not ready to change to
a computer based logging system.  One of the shortfalls of manual logging is
you lack the ability to sort by call sign. You are dependent on the date to
find the QSO and this can be a challenge as the amateur community cannot get
its act together on how to write the date. Some are absolutely terrible.

I have found and responded to all but a few of the recent QSL cards.
Figuring out the year is usually easy but the month and date can be a real
challenge.  One has printed text for Month/Date/Year with some some graphic
symbols below each that defy logic.  It is a good thing he had an easy to
read printed email address on the card so I could request clarification on
the date.  I have one that says 04.03.05 and his call in not in my log for
March, April or May over 2003, 2004 or 20054.  The call may be in one of my
computer based contest.log files but they are not summed together for an
easy search.  

Off the soapbox.

What do you do with bureau QSL cards that you cannot find in your log?
 
73, Dick AA5VU