I too watched Columbo, together with my mom, when I was younger, and later watched some older episodes on my own. At some point at my job I found myself "debugg

I too watched Columbo, together with my mom, when I was younger, and later watched some older episodes on my own. At some point at my job I found myself "debugging" people's requests for help/support using his "one last thing" technique. Especially if they are the type of enthusiastic, semi-sophisticated users, who try to second-guess how the application is written or why it crashed, without actually knowing anything about the code, and often make silly guesses and make suggestions which have little to do with reality. Before I started doing that, I would often be quite rude to people and cut them off, saying things like "no, that's not how the code works, I know that for a fact because I wrote it, the bug is somewhere else entirely". Then when I started using it instead, I would stare at them and say something like "oh, well, that's a very interesting option! Why didn't I think of that!" Then shut up for a few seconds like I'm deep in thought, then say "Oh, wait, I just thought of something. Do you mind showing me what you did on that screen again? I apologize but I have just this awful short term memory, can't remember what you wrote on that bug ticket ". Then they would indulge me, and I would say "Oh, wait, stop right there, that gave me a great idea what could have gone wrong, thank you". And then explain them in some details what caused the bug and how to work around it. Or I would say "thank you", get up and go after they showed me, and then pause at the door and say "oh, wait, there's this one thing I just thought about, do you mind if we try just one more thing? Sorry for taking your time" and then try the workaround, show them that it works, and explain it. All this when I actually understood what was the problem a few seconds after they showed me the problem. So I wasted a few more minutes being nice to this person and pretending I'm kind of dumb, but I know now they will won't be afraid to report future bugs to me or to suggest features, without fearing they will look dumb themselves. Unfortunately I have to be in the right frame of mind to do this, and lately I've found myself slipping more and more often back to the "that's not how the code works" retorts. It's good that this came up on NH today, it's a good reminder to try and go back to being a little more Columbo and a little less rude to people who try to be useful to me.