I've had a major victory at work. The GIS staff (all two of us) have spent the last few months going 10 rounds with the management about elevation inconsistencies in our GPS gear. The earth isn't round, as it turns out, which is a minor inconvenience to one or two of my fellow office-mates, who subsequently demanded that I make it that way, in addition to solidifying the magma and halting all gravitational interference from other stellar bodies. I'll get right on that. As soon as I become a Q.
Today my fellow GIS geek and I spent the morning crunching numbers trying to recall the trigonometry we learned in college. We managed to crank out a report justifying our margin of error. A serendipitous meeting about this very subject was then called by my boss for which we were fortuitously prepared, and with the help of tables, formulas, mathematical proofs, visual aids, and sharp pointy sticks, we finally managed to drive our point home.
Oh! So the earth isn't round!
No.
And it's kind of squishy!
Yes.
And that affects our readings!
Bingo.
And there is nothing our field crews can do change this fact!
Short of a conference with God, no.
Oh, I get it!
Halle-fricking-lujah. If I were allowed to have beer, I'd be cracking one open right now. Information and knowledge doesn't always stick around here, so I may have to plaster the walls of the conference room with this stuff again in the near future, but for now, I'm going to savor the success of managing to construct a sentence that the management seemed to absorb and accept. Small victories.