these things are ridiculously addictive.

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Your arch-nemesis is:	Charlie Chaplin
Why?	Because they saw you singing in the rain and told everyone
The winner will be...	You will forget about them as an arch nemesis and will find a new one
Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

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</table>

infuriated rant about idiots i am compelled to work with.

so there's this other big project, right?  and i was in no way involved in setting it up, or choosing the software, or anything.  but now _i_ have to deal with the data.

the database is set up to collect information from an ongoing series of surveys.  ok, all fine there.  except there is absolutely no point in collecting data if you can't analyze the data.  which is my job.  which means they have to download data from their system, and give it to me to read into my system.

which should be dead simple for any competant database manager.  you come up with a format for the data, a consistent format so you don't have to do it all from scratch every frickin' time, you hit the button, you generate a file.  if you are a reasonably decent human being, you get a few stats, like how many records are in the data, so the person you send it to has some reasonable idea of what they should be getting.

does this group do this?  no.

they apparently never thought about getting the data out of this system when they chose it, so they can't export things in any reasonably importable form.  they can write an ascii file, or an excel file.  the database consists of approximately 300 variables, some with lengths of 100 characters...not really workable in excel.  so they do it in ascii.  and every single time, the guy does it (apparently) from scratch.  so every time, the order of variables is different.  this time, he sent me over 2 dozen variables that appear nowhere in the survey instrument.  i don't know whether he's managing to channel future surveys, has somehow connected to someone else's data, or if he's just making stuff up.  i've asked him repeatedly to send me things in the same format, which should be the easiest thing for him to do anywhy.  but every time he does something different, and when i ask (politely, even!) if i can't have it in the same format as last time....he tells me he's too busy. 

it would save everyone a great deal of time if he could manage to learn how to do it _right_ .... but i guess he's too busy for that, too.