So today was my first round of interviews. STRESSFUL.
It started with being unable to print my documents on campus, so I had to go into town. Once in town I went to my normal internet café. When I went to print out one document, I could see that almost all the spaces between words had disappeared. I had to take 10 minutes to reinstate them all. Then I printed them all out (at US$0.40 a sheet!), only to discover that another document had similar problems. It was only then that I realized the files had been corrupted in such a way that deleted all the spaces between words that the computer didn't recognize as being French. Luckily these weren't crucial documents so I cut my losses and went to the campus to set everything up.
Though the set-up was fine, there were a ton of no-shows, to the point where even though I had overbooked the interviews to guard against such a crisis, I still only had two interviewees. Refusing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good (an expression translated by the title of this post), I decided to have the interviewers do one-on-one interviews and salvage whatever linguistic data I could get. At the very least it will inform my work, even if I can't formally include it in the study since its methodology is so divergent from the rest of the projected study's.
Tonight, a friend is taking me to dinner with his Haitian friend. Reports on that tomorrow.
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