Comment by IgorPartola
11 years ago
If only every bug report that I received had been processed by a geostatistician... Usually I get a "hey, I can't get X to work". One of three responses from me usually fixes it: "Is your computer on?", "are you online?", and "try hitting refresh".
I am actually surprised the sysadmin in this scenario thought it was a bad thing that the statistics department did their research and presented a well documented error.
Well, technically, the geostatistician (Did I spell that right?) was doing research that was orthogonal to the actual problem and its symptoms. In this case, the results were sufficiently odd that they sort of pointed in the right direction, but I've been sent off on wild goose chases by people skillfully applying their own particular set of skills before.
On the other hand, there's the word document with nothing but a screen shot showing half of a useless error message.
Reminds me... when I post a support request to Google Apps, the issue description header says "in as much detail as possible"... but the field is limited to 1000 characters. When you're dealing with anything other than simple first-level support issues, a user simply can't put in a usefully descriptive amount of detail...