I am on the brink of almost considering leaving the Information Technology field (so, not too close, really). I'm sick of not being able to find answers about software issues. The only way to find these answers is guesswork, trial and error, and downright scientific experimentation.

For example: When using Webalizer to monitor website stats, PDF files are included in the list of top accessed files on the site. But they are ranked by "hits" (also listing "kilobytes"). How can I convert "hits" to a useful metric like "page views"?
Does each PDF page count as one hit? Or can a page cause multiple hits, thanks to "byte range requests" breaking up the file? Seems like simple questions. Both Acrobat and Webalizer have predictable behavior which was created by humans. Yet, no websites have any info, Google Groups has nothing, and I probably won't hear back from the Webalizer author or from my Groups post. So, I'll never know how a huge portion of my website is being used.

Another example: What security settings I can apply to a PDF but still allow Google to index it, create a "View as HTML" cache, and/or extract the title and meta info? Can I specify information for the meta info that shows in search results?
I've searched the web and Groups for far too long, finding nothing. I've downloaded numerous PDF files (and observed my own) to see how Google handles different meta info and security settings. Yet I can find no pattern and no answrs. Both Acrobat and Google are finite systems with logic and algorithms which should be predictable and produce repeatable results. Yet they are acting as wild as nature, and the PDFs on my website still look like crap in Google's eyes.

Countless more examples: The countless error codes for countless, random, unreproducable errors that I receive from Microsoft software which are not documented anywhere. They are errors, they have codes, but they are not explained. It's beyond frustrating to hear "My computer crashed for no reason, here's the error I received." and have to reply "That could be caused by a hundred different things and it is impossible to diagnose." No MS knowledge base entries, no Groups answers, and no $200 to pay an MS tech to tell me I need to FDISK.

I don't understand. I'm not dealing with the unknowns of sub-atomic physics or brain chemistry. These software interactions should be possible to determine, and thus, could be documented or answered when asked. These answers must be out there, but I just can't find them. And high level functions at my work are suffering because of it.

I must not be cut out for Information Technology. I must just be too obsessive. That, or it should be renamed to Information Science for all the experimentation that's required to get anything to work. Thank heaven for the kind souls who continuously post their findings to Newsgroups, because without that, Microsoft Office would have killed me years ago.

Am I wrong? Am I nuts? Should I quit my job and move to Colorado to take up professional rock climbing? Or should I go back to my test network and keep testing, testing, testing?