Something happened at work today.
The bonus marks file didn’t work.
Well, at least for some colleagues.
Funny thing was, it worked for some marksheets, and yet for others, nothing happened.
I was first “activated” by D to help look into her marksheet and bonus marks file. At that point, I thought it was just hers. Maybe something had gone wrong with her file. Maybe something had been pasted wrongly somewhere.
And then, over Teams, K asked if I was experiencing issues with the bonus marks.
Oh.
Turned out the issue was bigger than I thought.
Three modules were affected: SIP, TCU and ELS 1.
But even then, it wasn’t every class. Some classes worked perfectly fine. Others didn’t.
Which meant it probably wasn’t the module marksheet itself. It also probably wasn’t the bonus marks file, because everyone was using the same one.
So I investigated.
And believe me, I had so much fun.
I mean that genuinely.
There was something about having this weird little problem dropped in front of me — something that didn’t quite make sense — and then having to troubleshoot it, test possibilities, rule things out and slowly figure out what was actually happening.
It was genuinely what I kind of craved.
A puzzle.
And solve it I did.
I’m not going to go too much into the technical details, but suffice it to say that the problem had to do with how the Excel file downloaded from SAS was storing some of its data.
It didn’t have this issue before.
But now it does.
The values looked perfectly normal on the screen. You could copy them. You could paste them. Everything looked like it should work.
Except Excel apparently disagreed.
Once I figured that out, the fix itself was easy. Albeit tedious.
Make sure the data in the affected columns was formatted properly, and suddenly the marksheets started working again.
Mystery solved.
I suppose the slightly funny thing about today is how much I enjoyed the whole thing.
It wasn’t my module. It wasn’t really my problem to begin with. I was just “activated” because somebody needed help.
But give me a strange problem where the obvious explanation doesn’t quite fit, let me poke around for a while, and apparently I’m quite happy.
Yay me!
