I also grew up in Boston and I find sports unbearably dull. Never had any sports idols. Never been able to sit through a sporting event without getting bored.

"Human beings do and are interested in wildly different things. Whoa"

When I watch competitive esports I never cheer for NA.

Too bad you don't know any programming. That would have been a perfect instance to use it. Turn 11.5 hours into about 30 seconds, but of course creating the function would add to the time too, depending on your skill level.

But we're talking about emails that were scanned into PDF files. And the quality is quite poor. Plus I had to check for content and redundancy. How would you have done it?

The other issue is that the PDFs aren't all just emails. Each attachment is scanned too - drawings, label art, carton art, bills of materials, China agency docs, etc. The PDFs vary in size from 7K (a single page) to 4G (44 pages).

I'm probably going to have to go back over them again over the next week or so.

I'd use OCR Text Recognition in Adobe Acrobat Pro to get everything into ASCII format, then go from there. I'd need to know a little bit more about the structure of the information, and the constraints with which to query before I could tell you exactly what to do, but generally searching ASCII files and populating an Excel spreadsheet with the data is a fairly easy task.

Check your PM.

I think age group has a lot to do with it. When I was a kid there was no cable TV, no home computers, no video games, no Molly Ringwald, etc. There was basically nothing else to do but play sports and keep up with the home teams.

They hadn't invented music yet back then?