bending_sickle | Oh, you know what I say when I feel like swearing? Fudge!* (Reply)

I'll get right into why today was, again, made of utter, utter fail and not in the awesome way of

made_of_fail_pc at all but first I need to rant and rave about fucking conversions of goddamned geographic locations that suck ass.

So way back in May I did a calling station in the field, which means I went out and tried to trick lions and other thingies to me by playing a recording of a baby buffalo going, "Oh my god, I'm dying! I'm being killed! I'll be a hamburger in a moment! Oh, won't something eat me please!" Since it was the second one we'd done that evening and it was pitch black for the most of it and by gods I am human and we may at times forget shit, I forgot to get a goddamned GPS location for the site of crime. This is not good. (Not necessary, but a hole in my research, I liketh not.)

So seeing as I, at the time, had a boyfriend right the fuck there, within walking distance of the site (if you were, y'know, insane enough to walk it) I asked him to pretty please with a cherry on top get me a GPS location. A few months later, we get back onto the subject and he finally gets me the GPS location.

Cue squee? No! Cue mother-fuckin' fail. Why? I'll tell you why: the GPS location was in the UTM system, and not in the Latitude&Longitude one I've used for my entire study. Oh, sure, I'm assured that the UTM system is "what everyone uses" but I don't give a deep-fried rat's ass what everyone else uses (and no, it's not what everyone else uses). We'd already discussed, when I was on-site, that I used a different system, and I'd seen how easy it was to change the GPS thingy to give you the location in a different system, and I'd said in my email to please use that system. So it wasn't even hard. ~~That's what she said.~~ And again, I stress, this mythical Everyone can use it, but if you know I use a different system, and all my coordinates are in that system, why the flippin' pancakes would a different system that Mr Everyone sues be okay or useful to me?

So now I have a coordinate that I don't know how to use or convert (and holy gods is the conversion complicated and rife with equations and shit). So that's going to be a shitload of head-desking which could have been avoided by a simple menu change when getting the coordinate.

Gods! It's like someone's dying of thirst, right, and they ask you for water, so you hand 'em a coconut, which sure, it's water and fine and all that, but how the fuck does the person dying of thirst get to the water inside the rock-hard and mocking coconut? How, I ask ye?!?

I think I might just fudge the whole coordinate thing by getting coordinates from lion observations that are close and then just extrapolating from there.

ETA: And asking for Boy to get the coordinates again - this time in a system I can use - isn't going to happen because Things Changed and communication is Not Happening and that needs to be Resolved first - if at fucking all - and fuck that shit and aaaaargh.

Other reasons today suck include:

1) waking up at embarrasingly late hours
2) starting work at so way past noon it's almost 1 pm
3) lunch made of little more than fail
4) hours spent trying to collage together photographs of a map to make a single unified map photo ending in fantastic fail
5) afore-ranted faaaaaaiiiiiiil
6) freezing to death in a wool sweater and fleece jacket, pining for gloves, in the office
7) progress non-existant apart from a single summary table
8) no Zumba tonight, so fuck that too

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