Due to circumstances . . .

I'm sure you're familiar with those very professional sounding sentences that we often put in survey reports and other very professional documents: "Due to uncontrollable circumstances, no data was collected in Bubalbok Village." Have you ever wondered what the uncontrollable circumstances were? Professional documents might be a lot more interesting to read if we told the stories behind the uncontrollable circumstances . . .

Due to the arrival of a dump truck, the surveyor did not finish eliciting the word list in Gibidai village, because the entire village climbed into the dump truck and went to market.

Due to the distraction of having a bird relieve itself on the surveyor's clip board, the words for "mother" and "father" were inadvertently not elicited in Koumaio village.

Due to the fact that the people rowing the boat refused to stop rowing, the survey team did not visit Atolok village because the rowers rowed right past it and would not stop.

Due to the unfortunate landing of an exceedingly large bug on the surveyor's hand just as she was marking a GPS point, this point may be marked several metres away from where she was actually standing, because the GPS device may have travelled several metres through the air during the process of removing the exceedingly large bug.