Work was fun today. Without details (and throwing people under a bus): There is a process that takes data from one system and through a some magic and a Python script, produces an Excel spreadsheet. The original data is sensitive so it is modestly adjusted (we can't give precise addresses in the data) so it can be made available to the public.
The original Python script writer is not in the office and unable to make any adjustments for a while, so the boss comes to me. Apparently the Python and magic haven't been playing together and the output has not been created for a little while. I tried running the script manually and it failed. I now have the project.
Long story short, I was able to decipher most of what was written (though I'm baffled as to why some of it was written the way it was) and got the thing running. I had a couple of adjustment to make to the script, but the bigger problem is the original input has two fields set as text -- they are longitude and latitude (see why I am involved?) and we need these as floating point numbers (numbers on both sides of the decimal point). After converting the long/lat fields to numbers in the Excel file, all is good. Now, I'll manually go through this process for the next few days until I can either figure out how to convert the text to floating point or the magic part of this (another office) converts the fields. Because this is tied to a GIS database, the "normal" way of converting doesn't work - it seems to be the way a field name is addressed.
Oh, yeah - the magic person was complaining that, out of 14,000-some records that magic gives GIS, only 12,000-some records are returned. I pointed out that any records given to GIS without long/lat data can't be processed. I even mentioned that the most likely reason the long/lat are missing is because the other system isn't running those addresses through a verification process, and some specific reasons why that might happen. Maybe it's because English probably isn't magic person's native language, but I just got smiles and blank stares.
I deserved ice cream, tonight.
