On one of the frivolous mailing lists in the Windows project, somebody spotted some behavior that seemed pretty bad and filed a bug on it. The project was winding down, with fewer and fewer bugs being accepted by the release management team each day, so it was not entirely surprising that this particular bug was also rejected. News of this smackdown threw the mailing list into an fit of apoplexy.

Don’t they realize how bad this bug is? Somebody should reactivate this bug.

Yeah, this is really serious. I don’t think they understood the scope of the problem. Somebody should mark the bug for reconsideration.

Definitely. Someone should reactivate the bug and reassert the issue.

After about a half dozen of messages like this, I couldn’t take it any longer.

I can’t believe I’m reading this.

I decided to Be Someone. I reactivated the bug and included a justification.

Don’t just stand around saying somebody should do something. Be that someone.

(And even though it’s not relevant to the story, the bug was ultimately accepted by the release management team the second time around because all the discussion of the bug gave the bug representative more information with which to to argue why the bug should be fixed.)