Words a bioinformatician never wants to hear

Something cynical for a rainy Friday at the end of a long week :^)

• “The data is all in these [proprietary and undocumented format] files.”
• “What I want is a program to browse, edit and validate gigabyte-size whole genome sequencing runs. It should import and export all known formats. And it has to run in a browser. And some of staff refuse to use anything but IE6.”
• (After delivering an insignificant or negative result) “Can’t you analyse it again?”
• “Why don’t we put the new server rack in your office?”
• “That software you wrote is buggy! [What happened?] It’s not working! [How do you know that?] It’s broken! [In what way?] Can’t you just fix it? [How? I don't know what's wrong ...]“
• “I don’t understand: [large research institute / multinational commercial company] has software that can do this. Can’t you write something similar?”
• “This is a great / exciting opportunity …”
• “This program is great. But could you rewrite it in another programming language?”
• “That database and web service you wrote for X? We need one that works just like that. Except for … [lists dozens of ways in which the new service actually differs entirely from the previous one]“
• “You want to know what feature or task is the most important? They all are!”
• (After being told that the data sample is too small, or incorrectly sampled such that analysis is impossible.) “You don’t understand – we really need this result.”
• “Here’s the data. I haven’t had time to clean it up, so it might be incomplete. And some of the identifiers might not agree. And there are mis-spellings …”
• (After delivering the outcome of an analysis) “Pth – that result is obvious.”
• “Don’t worry about who’s going to [maintain the new database / monitor the new service / curate the data / come in on the weekends to restart the system]. We’ll work that out later …”
• “So X wrote us this pipeline before he left. I’m not sure if he finished it. No, there’s no documentation. Can you get it working? By next week?”
• “I think I read a way to do this: it was in a journal, maybe. Or on a webpage. Done by some lab in France. Or was it China? Anyway, it should be simple.”
• “Do you really need that much disk space for this NGS data?”
• “So your program crashed when I tried to load data. What format? Does that matter? They were Word documents. Really, the program doesn’t read those?”
• “So, what you’re saying is that a Word document isn’t a text file. But I used Courier as a font.”
• “We need this program. It’s really simple … [30 minutes of essential features follow]“
• (While waiting for the result of a Bayesian calculation) “Why does it take so long to get this answer? Can’t you just make it go faster?”
• “I know you said that 30 data points were the minimum for statistical rigour. But we only got 5. Can’t you analyze it anyway?”
• “We keep all those records in Excel files … uh, I think this is the most current version …”
• “The Z lab showed you could do this [with 10 genes and a computing cluster]. So do you think you could this this with our data [200 whole genomes, on a PC]?”
• “Good news – we got a huge grant for sequencing and annotating 6 squillion whole genomes. You’re not on the grant and we didn’t budget for any bioinformatic work but here’s the data. Can you have this done by next week?”
• (After being told that an analysis is impossible or ill-considered) “But X over in Y’s lab does it all the time.”
• “Uh, so what is it that you’re doing again?”

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