You Who?

What's a few dashes amongst friends?

There are people in the world who have absolutely no concept of how exactingly precise computers are -- and one of them works closely with me. Usually, this is not a problem, but sometimes it all goes awry, like today. I'm responsible for loading pricing data supplied by this person into the database -- sounds easy enough, right? Extract part numbers and prices from a spreadsheet; match the existing part numbers up to the database; update existing entries; insert the new entries. It's a half-hour job! No problem! Wait a minute... what's this...? Why all the errors? The spreadsheet -- rather than having exact part numbers -- has just about part numbers... 'XYZ-1000-A' when it should be 'XYZ1000-A' or my favorite, random stray spaces like 'XYZ-  1000-A   '. The attitude when I point out these problems? "Well you know what I mean." Yes I do, but the computer does not. Sure, sure, a little perl can fix anything, but what a waste of time finding, fixing, finding more, fixing more... My only hope is to fix the spreadsheet, send it back and say "Use this version next time." But that rarely works.