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Today is *not* a good day.

I awoke this morning with a fairly major headache, after sampling many cocktails. Ouch. I awoke at 11am, ready to face a fryup, and that done, to face the day. So I looked at the database system I had to install queries in, and all seemed well. So I went back to surfing, churning over in my mind how I was to write these VBA bits so that the system would work. Calculating filters, minor restructures, and code.

At 8pm, I remembered that tonight was the Drama Soc Meal. And – never one to turn down a free dinner – I trundled off to the meeting place. Dinner was *fantastic* I’m reliably told the wine was nice, that the deserts were to die for, and I can personally vouch for the lasagne and the prawn cocktail. The people were great, the food was great, the resterant was at the top of a building overlooking one of the nicer parts of Sunderland, and I was a Very Good Person, and drank only water all night. Not that I could have faced the prospect of alcohol, but I was to have Work To Do. And so, at around midnight, I arrived back at my flat, and loaded up the database.

Two hours later I was totally confused. This thing bore no relation to what I was expecting to do, and the minor restructures started to grow until I may have to petition for a total rethink, and deadline is tomorrow. Argle, so I started with solving one problem well, after which everything would fall into place.

Do you see the mistake I made? Indeed.

So for an hour and a half, I worked carefully on this query to bring up somebody’s Performance chart when you clicked the button in their record. Easy stuff. Tell Visual Basic to view the “Complaints” form, filtered so only the field with the correct StaffID matched. Easy. Pie. Done.

Except it didn’t. It kept asking me for a “StaffID”. *Why*? I asked it, You *Have* a StaffID! I *Gave* you a frigging ID. You are not a free record, You are a number. Deal!

Except it didn’t. So I went around it. I fed it variables instead of actual physical numbers. And it wanted a staff ID. So I told it to stop filtering, and it stoped asking me.

And thus did the debugging process continue. And thusly did I verily find out what the flying fsck was wrong.

Rule One of Programming: The Way A Computer Tells One Thing From Another Is Spaces.

It was right, in it’s way, There was no “StaffID”. This was because it was “Staff ID”. With a Space.

Did I mention the thing about spaces? I might have done.

Renaming the fields will unstructure the DB. So I can’t do that before tomorrow. I am, probably, a dead man.

Oh well. Back to the grindstone….

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