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I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any

I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility. I also get a lot of near-misses, where they almost get it right: for example, copying the bit that says "there was an error, please include the information below when you report it" without actually copying the stack trace underneath the message, or copying the first line of the error which says "cannot read property id of undefined" without the stack trace that would tell me what it was trying to do at the time. Also, users who paraphrase the error message instead of copying it (Them: "When I try to view a Thingie, I get an error that it couldn't be read." Me: "Can you copy the exact error message please? There are several different reasons that a Thingie might not be readable, the error should tell me what I need to fix.") It doesn't help matters that some of the software I inherited uses this antipattern: try { // Long and complex operation } catch (Exception e) { Alert("There was an error. Please contact IT."); quit(); } The first time I got a report for this software was rather confusing. "It says there was an error." "Can you tell me what the error message says?" "Yes, it says 'there was an error.'" "I know, but what was the error message?" "'There was an error!'"

upvotinglurker 10y ago
>I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility. Got this from the "IT person" at a small satellite campus of the college I work for. That is how I knew they were not actually an IT person.
masklinn 10y ago
> I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility. Yes I forgot to write that part in: while we rarely get the "screenshot pasted in word" (which IIRC stores the full image by default so you may be able to recover it, yay) the screenshotted traceback is usually cut off at the bottom, so we get the least useful part (wow I get the stack information of the WSGI handler, well that's going to be helpful) but commonly don't get the actually interesting part. > It doesn't help matters that some of the software I inherited uses this antipattern: […] Fuck everything about that with a rusty bonesaw.

upvotinglurker 10y ago

>I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility. Got this from the "IT person" at a small satellite campus of the college I work for. That is how I knew they were not actually an IT person.

masklinn 10y ago

> I get the same thing--or worse, screen shot pasted into a Word document that's attached to the email, so their two monitors are squished into 8.5 inches and any text is scaled down to illegibility. Yes I forgot to write that part in: while we rarely get the "screenshot pasted in word" (which IIRC stores the full image by default so you may be able to recover it, yay) the screenshotted traceback is usually cut off at the bottom, so we get the least useful part (wow I get the stack information of the WSGI handler, well that's going to be helpful) but commonly don't get the actually interesting part. > It doesn't help matters that some of the software I inherited uses this antipattern: […] Fuck everything about that with a rusty bonesaw.