Feeling like a political administrator

Not that I want to offend anybody but what is going on in politics sometimes gives the impression that some of the people working "there" do not really know what they do all day. Today we experienced the same while trying to write a lab report. Still strengthened by a collective eating session yesterday evening (and sweating out everything bad that might have entered our immune system in the last months as we ate Indian food) we met in the physics building (yes, on a Sunday ... :/ ) and tried to figure out what to do for this report. We understood that the lab was about something really unintuitive when you hear it for the first time and especially when you did not treat it in a lecture before so the afternoon mainly consisted of - how one of the attendees put it - "f*ck ups" and "screw ups".

Bad data format is a reason for physicists to
become "hackers" - or to engage
nerd rage mode. ;)

Actually we did quite a lot! Like writing the most pointless python scripts ever to convert the data we received from our supervisor into a format that allowed us to actually use the data, then plotting it and wondering if it makes any sense what we see. Especially as all our results looked different from each other ... At least we enjoyed ourselves when everytime we succeeded in removing one more space or tab another one appeared where we did not expect it. For some "mind cinema" you can imagine the scenery as three physicists sitting in a circle around their laptops in a probably rather unhealthy position, hacking on their keyboards and occasionally making a resigned "mmmh" sound, sometimes disrupted by an outburst of nerd rage violence like "AAAAARGH NOT AN INTEGER?!? OF COURSE NOT, I GAVE YOU A COMPLEX NUMBER YOU LITTLE PIECE OF ****!!"

Ok that was maybe a little too much of clichees but do not worry about our mental health, we sat in a room with big windows flooded with sunlight and most of the time we engaged in very friendly and high-class conversation. ;) Only still we do not know what to do with our data ...