This morning I participated in my first department meeting which seemed harmless enough. Once done, and for the rest of the day except for a short trip out to get crepes, I scrubbed data. A submission from a third party included contracts for whom the important data were spread cross multiple documents and no one had a canonical list of contract names. The names and terms of those contracts would change such that in some places a client’s name were abbreviated and in others not. I came up with a function that pulled things together for analysis but this required repeated VLOOKUPs making it so that running it on the whole range would be something whose completion would be witnessed by my grandchildren.

I asked a coworker and he said this was somewhat standard. I now understand why some of my coworkers drink.