Grrrr

[jethrien]

I just growled at my computer. Didn't actually realize I was doing it until I was already growling. Stupid client and his stupid typos and stupid stupid stupid! Gah! How am I supposed to analyze numerical data when it's riddled with typos?

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I just got a submission where the author, instead of using the page number function, manually entered the page number and a hard page break on every single paged. I say we turn this down just based on the fact that it would take a week to unfuck the formatting.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

That's about what we do in Law-land. I've heard of cases where courts rejected briefs for having 1.25" margins instead of 1" margins.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see, I wish we could do that. But we're generally the ones trying to convince clients they need us, not the other way around. So I'm usually the one who has to deal with the fact that their data has the crappiest formatting imaginable.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Observation: You need a friendly neighborhood Perl-scripter. Perl is superb for dealing quickly and efficiently with malformed data.

Warning: Perl works best with plain text files, comma-separated files, and other files without proprietary formats that take forever to reverse-engineer.

Commentary: Organics have this distressing tendency to display socially unacceptable levels of anger towards inorganic objects. Peculiarly, they seem surprised when inorganic objects reciprocate by being unhelpful. Meatbags are strange beings indeed.

Reluctant Addendum: I, too, have been guilty of death threats and physical abuse towards inoffensive, eager-to-help computers.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Observation: Clients who send malformed data tend to send it in annoying proprietary formats, most likely Excel.

There has to be a "client voodoo doll" out there for sale somewhere. Just don't get angry at the computer. It didn't do anything wrong...this time.

Resigned comment: Back to being satanic and figuring out whether a client can fire a guy for inappropriate behavior resulting from depression brought on by dealing with ALS.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I'm not angry at the computer. I wasn't actually growling at the computer itself, just the data on it.

This is indeed in Excel.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I know Perl, at least the basics. It's entirely unhelpful here. These errors are pretty damn creative, really. It's to the point that I can't farm it out to one of the data processors - most of this stuff is only fixable on a case by case basis. That is, I can look at the data myself and I can generally tell what it's supposed to be, but it's not anything I can think of actual guidelines for. Just a year's worth of experience.

But unfortunately, it's only really practical to look at the data in the right way if I get an error message. Which may or may not come up. Basically, I think I've found most of the implausible errors. But none of the plausible ones. And some of the implausible ones keep coming up...

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

>"Organics have this distressing tendency to display socially unacceptable levels of anger towards inorganic objects." etc.

Ray, please write a book. Fiction. Your worldview is fascinating, and I miss Douglas Adams.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Um ... for ripping off Knights of the Old Republic?

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

Oh, oops. Hehe. It sounded like a Ray-ism, and I still think you should write a book.