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Okay. Work. I need people to bear with me, I had a small psychotic break today.
There is this database of names and events involved in a historic period, that we've all be consistently adding to over the course of a year. It's in a single Excel document, because it is, shut up. We've been slowly building it from multiple historical sources for over a year.
Today, I was adding a few more names from the latest source we've acquired, when I noticed a couple of oddities. Name: Catherine, Other Info: Son of John. Name: Billy, Other Info: Wife of Michael. I thought, that can't be right. I barely noticed the first time, just a vague notion that it was odd, but when I caught the second one, I got this queasy feeling in my gut. So I went up to one of the more famous names, one where it'd be easy to recognise if the info matched the name.
None of the info matches. NONE OF IT.
What happened was, at some point, someone (quite possibly me) hit 'Sort descending' for column A, but forget to sort adjacent columns too. And judging from how far apart one Name was from his identifiable Info (150 rows down), this was done MONTHS AGO. And nobody noticed. So every single subsequent edit anyone did just moved all the information further away from it's component pieces until the entire fucking database is completely and utterly useless. It is FUBARed. Completely.
That is over a year's worth of work, fucked into uselessness. It's gone. Even the stuff that was done before, the data from previous years that we built this out of, is retroactively lost because it's all one document. The whole fucking thing is completely gone.
I cried. I legitimately broke down. And, okay, in one sense it's lucky I noticed, because this version was sent off to be reformatted recently to be added to the permanent PUBLIC archive (they'll upload it onsite when it's done), so if I hadn't caught it now we'd not only be FUBARed, we'd be publically FUBARed. But all I could think was that I should have noticed MONTHS ago. For the love of god.
One click. If you forget one click, and don't notice it, everything done for MONTHS afterwards is rendered completely useless. How. HOW.
And I was so upset, I was having genuine hysterics, that I forgot not to say stuff out loud. My site manager was saying "Ah well, at least you'll have something to keep you busy for a while." Trying to be comforting or something. And then, "That's the problem with being good at something, you know. You'll be asked to keep doing it."
And I broke down and cried: "But I'm good at everything!"
That is a thing I said. Out loud. To my boss. *muffles face in palms* And I didn't even mean I'm better than anyone, I meant that if that's the measure of being good at something, I've been good at everything they've asked me to do so far (tours, databases, typing, press releases, etc). But. I mean. I always knew I was arrogant, but that came out of my mouth. In front of people.
For the love of gods. Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods.
We have the original archived copy of the list, from a year back. It's not interactable anymore, so we'd have to manually write it all down and re-type it into a new document (300 or more names), but at least we wouldn't have to recompile it from scratch from the sources.
This last years work, though? Redo from scratch. There's no previous version available anymore. We have to start again. I mean, we can use some info from the corrupted version, but given that things were edited into previous profiles from new sources, and possibly edited while attached to the wrong names, there is nothing in it that's trustworthy anymore. There is nothing that we can guarantee is uncorrupted.
I had a breakdown. For real. My manager was sort of ... we can fix it, honest we can, what if we do ... Except we can't do. I pointed out why we can't do. Accurately. I am ever accurate in my panic. And he was all ... He left me go five minutes early and was basically "I'll retrieve the bits I recognise, you go home, please stop freaking out at me now?".
And I said that out loud. "But I'm good at everything!" That is a thing I have now said.
My gods and little fishes, I need a redo of this day. Or, well. Technically months. I need to go back in time and stop that mistake from happening.
If I can figure out exactly when it was done and who did it, anyway. It was at least one month ago, dating by an email, and more like two or three dating by information added as best we can judge. It could have been any of us. All we had to do was forget one click and fail to notice it in time.
Why is this a thing that can happen? *plaintive* Why is that a thing that can happen to me?
So not a good day. This was NOT A GOOD DAY.
Today, I was adding a few more names from the latest source we've acquired, when I noticed a couple of oddities. Name: Catherine, Other Info: Son of John. Name: Billy, Other Info: Wife of Michael. I thought, that can't be right. I barely noticed the first time, just a vague notion that it was odd, but when I caught the second one, I got this queasy feeling in my gut. So I went up to one of the more famous names, one where it'd be easy to recognise if the info matched the name.
None of the info matches. NONE OF IT.
What happened was, at some point, someone (quite possibly me) hit 'Sort descending' for column A, but forget to sort adjacent columns too. And judging from how far apart one Name was from his identifiable Info (150 rows down), this was done MONTHS AGO. And nobody noticed. So every single subsequent edit anyone did just moved all the information further away from it's component pieces until the entire fucking database is completely and utterly useless. It is FUBARed. Completely.
That is over a year's worth of work, fucked into uselessness. It's gone. Even the stuff that was done before, the data from previous years that we built this out of, is retroactively lost because it's all one document. The whole fucking thing is completely gone.
I cried. I legitimately broke down. And, okay, in one sense it's lucky I noticed, because this version was sent off to be reformatted recently to be added to the permanent PUBLIC archive (they'll upload it onsite when it's done), so if I hadn't caught it now we'd not only be FUBARed, we'd be publically FUBARed. But all I could think was that I should have noticed MONTHS ago. For the love of god.
One click. If you forget one click, and don't notice it, everything done for MONTHS afterwards is rendered completely useless. How. HOW.
And I was so upset, I was having genuine hysterics, that I forgot not to say stuff out loud. My site manager was saying "Ah well, at least you'll have something to keep you busy for a while." Trying to be comforting or something. And then, "That's the problem with being good at something, you know. You'll be asked to keep doing it."
And I broke down and cried: "But I'm good at everything!"
That is a thing I said. Out loud. To my boss. *muffles face in palms* And I didn't even mean I'm better than anyone, I meant that if that's the measure of being good at something, I've been good at everything they've asked me to do so far (tours, databases, typing, press releases, etc). But. I mean. I always knew I was arrogant, but that came out of my mouth. In front of people.
For the love of gods. Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods.
We have the original archived copy of the list, from a year back. It's not interactable anymore, so we'd have to manually write it all down and re-type it into a new document (300 or more names), but at least we wouldn't have to recompile it from scratch from the sources.
This last years work, though? Redo from scratch. There's no previous version available anymore. We have to start again. I mean, we can use some info from the corrupted version, but given that things were edited into previous profiles from new sources, and possibly edited while attached to the wrong names, there is nothing in it that's trustworthy anymore. There is nothing that we can guarantee is uncorrupted.
I had a breakdown. For real. My manager was sort of ... we can fix it, honest we can, what if we do ... Except we can't do. I pointed out why we can't do. Accurately. I am ever accurate in my panic. And he was all ... He left me go five minutes early and was basically "I'll retrieve the bits I recognise, you go home, please stop freaking out at me now?".
And I said that out loud. "But I'm good at everything!" That is a thing I have now said.
My gods and little fishes, I need a redo of this day. Or, well. Technically months. I need to go back in time and stop that mistake from happening.
If I can figure out exactly when it was done and who did it, anyway. It was at least one month ago, dating by an email, and more like two or three dating by information added as best we can judge. It could have been any of us. All we had to do was forget one click and fail to notice it in time.
Why is this a thing that can happen? *plaintive* Why is that a thing that can happen to me?
So not a good day. This was NOT A GOOD DAY.