Comment by mcguire

Well, technically, the geostatistician (Did I spell that right?) was doing research that was orthogonal to the actual problem and its symptoms. In this case, the results were sufficiently odd that they sort of pointed in the right direction, but I've been sent off on wild goose chases by people skillfully applying their own particular set of skills before.

On the other hand, there's the word document with nothing but a screen shot showing half of a useless error message.