Some questions should never be asked

Looking beneath the surface of anything here is a terrible idea but, sometimes, someone is foolhardy enough to do so. I'm pretty sure it's not a part of my position description but, traditionally, this tends to be me.

This time around, I've been trying to make sense of something that I've always known intuitively was a mess, but was probably a mess with some underlying pretense of method, even if it was a pretense honoured in the breach rather than the observance.

In some respects, it seems, I'm a very slow learner.

After finally acknowledging that what I was looking at was pure, unadulterated chaos, I asked the Stress Fiend if she knew how to interpret the informational entrails I was struggling with.

Variations of "Don't know", "Ted always looked after that" and "Yeah, that's always been a tricky one, that..." haven't inspired much confidence.