I probably blogged about this before, and people around me have heard
my rants on this many times before, yet I feel the urge to blog on this
now: ignorant l-users.
For some reason, a lot of people think error messages exist only for one
reason, to annoy them. Popups, other error messages, not relevant, just
call B10m, he knows/should know everything.
A lot of times, I receive e-mails telling me that the email is
not working. After many times, I refrain from replying
"it seems to work rather well, I got your message".
Those senders usually mean that some email got bounced. So of course
I ask them why and they usually respond with something like:
"That's what I would like to know".
So I start explaining that if they received a message claiming the
delivery failed, it most likely also tells them the reason for this.
Either some zealous spam filter, blacklist, or the recipient's mailbox
is full (yes, that still exists too). Anyways, in 99% of the cases,
it will tell you why the delivery failed and if you're lucky
it even provides you with a link that explains it in more detail.
But of course they deleted that bounce report and I have to start
guessing what went wrong. The tea prices on the Chinese export market,
alignment of certain planets, any
BOFH excuse
... it really can be anything.
Or, like I noticed today, someone claimed to get an
Internal Server Error and was friendly enough to pass it on
to a coworker. He forwarded it to me with the question:
"What is he doing wrong?".
I have to admit, the 500 Internal Server Error isn't too descriptive
to the end user, yet the least you could do is tell me when this happened,
and what caused this behavior. Makes debugging and going through
logfiles a lot easier. But of course, I should have known exactly what
the guy did wrong...
Or what about a broken laptop? I received a phone call from someone,
who told me the laptop was hanging. Rebooting didn't help, it kept on
hanging. During the booting, some text was displayed, but it would
hang again after that. "What the text said? Oh I don't know!"
"B10m! This stupid program isn't working! What should I do now?"
For some reason, some people think that I am watching their screens
constantly, which is -of course- not true. I watch it sometimes, but
not constantly ;-) So, I walk over there to check out what's going on.
"Please replicate that error, so I can see what's going on".
And before you know it, I see an error popup, but within 10 microseconds
it was gone again.
"Let's try again, and try to click that OK button with a little delay, so maybe I can read parts of it this time".
Computer users please remember a few things before you call your local
victimcomputer guy:
- We are not watching your screen so we have no clue what you're
doing
- We usually do not know what you want a program to do
- We do not like spending evenings, even weekends on your problem
- We don't ask you to paint our house for free either
- We do have other (useless) things to do besides fixing your stuff
- We do like you to search online for a solution
- We do like to hear what the error message said, even though we know
you couldn't care less