It is a common occurrence that a question is sent to a mailing that is close, but not quite right. Usually somebody will provide information to help redirect the question to a more appropriate mailing list. But this effort does not always go unpunished.
From: X A customer is encountering a problem with Product Q when they blah blah ...
I noted some time ago that I have taken to "blaming" Exchange when someone assumes that my reply to a thread on a distribution list implies that I have taken responsibility for resolving their problem. One of my colleagues in another group is in a similar situation with respect to a different product, and he has taken to using the same basic...
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Or free code either.
Many years ago, I wrote some samples for the SDK as a favor, and at each major SDK release, I am reminded that no good deed goes unpunished.
I can tell when a major SDK release is coming, because I get a piece of mail that goes something like this:
Hi. You are on file as the owner ...
There were several suggestions as to how I could avoid being tagged as the owner of an issue because I helped route the problem. Many of them involved assigning the bug back to the testers to "teach them a lesson".
Punishing the tester doesn't help the product.
Remember, we're all in this together. The goal is to fix bugs and ship a quality...
Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut.
When I reply to a question on an internal discussion list, often with a clarifying question rather than an answer, it will occasionally happen that the person I replied to will send a response directly to me rather than including the discussion list. This is bad for a few reasons.
I ...
Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut.
The other day I got a piece of email requesting that I look at a crashed system because the tester believed it was another instance of bug 12345. While that may very well have been the case, bug 12345 was a kernel pool corruption bug in the object manager, something of which ...