A lot of bitching about school

So I have a paper due tomorrow. It is supposed to be a comparison of a commercial database as found on two different vendors. So, consider it perhaps like comparing shopping at Best Buy the store compared to BestBuy.com... do they carry the same products? Are the products in the same areas? Are the prices the same? If you look for CDs by Lionel Richie, do you get the same results at the store as you do online? Etc... etc...

Now imagine, if you will, that you had to write this paper except you weren't allowed in the Best Buy store. Oh, you could check the Web site all you wanted but nope, you couldn't go in-store. It would make some actual comparisons pretty difficult, wouldn't it? It's hard to determine if those products are in the same place or if the Lionel Richie CDs are the same if you can't actually look in the store. And this, my friends, is the problem with my paper.

I was assigned a database to investigate (Aquatic Sciences & Fisheries Abstract) and have no problem accessing it the one way. However, the other way, I'm not allowed to access. Seems the student account to this vendor is limited and one of the limits is that students cannot access Aquatic Sciences & Fisheries Abstract. Great. And I discovered this yesterday after I had done every other part of my paper. All that was left was for me to conduct the same searches in this other product and see how my results differed and then draw some conclusions. Except nope. Did I mention that our professor ASSIGNED these databases? So she assigned me a database that was not accessible and then expects me to write a paper explaining how it is different... I'm so annoyed about it all. Then, when she finally got back to me, she made it seem like it was my fault that this database wasn't accessible. Have I mentioned how much I dislike this woman? (Oh right, here and here and here) She basically implied that had I not waited until the last minute to do my homework, the database might have been accessible then. Or that I could have been given another database. Which actually, Saturday afternoon when the paper is due Monday at 11:55pm is NOT the last minute at all!! Especially since I did have a lot of it done already.

So, her solution was to have me search a similar database - one that students can access - in the same product and make my conclusions. In my example, that would be like me going to Circuit City instead to compare it to BestBuy.com. Actually, it would be more like me going to OfficeMax, where some of the items overlap but a lot of them are completely different. It's like comparing apples and oranges, like the saying says. (Maybe I'll use that in my paper!) All the searches I already did that I was going to replicate... useless. It's very frustrating and I've spent a good part of today kind of blocked as to what the hell I'm going to write instead. At LEAST she sent me an extra email and told me not to panic and that she would take it all into consideration with her grading but still... I am panicked and unhappy. The other thing that upsets me is that I was so sure this was going to be an awesome paper. And now I know it's going to suck.