{"id":14283,"date":"2010-04-21T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2010\/04\/21\/email-tip-when-you-say-that-something-didnt-work-you-have-to-say-how-it-didnt-work\/"},"modified":"2010-04-21T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T07:00:00","slug":"email-tip-when-you-say-that-something-didnt-work-you-have-to-say-how-it-didnt-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20100421-00\/?p=14283","title":{"rendered":"Email tip: When you say that something didn&#039;t work, you have to say how it didn&#039;t work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I illustrate this point with an imaginary conversation, inspired by actual ones I&#8217;ve seen (and, occasionally, been a frustrated party to).<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p>  <b>From<\/b>: X <\/p>\n<p> I want to do ABC, but I don&#8217;t have a DEF. Anybody know of a workaround? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> Somebody has an idea:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p>  <b>From<\/b>: Y <\/p>\n<p> Try mounting this ISO file into a virtual machine and  trying the ABC from there. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> Unfortunately, it didn&#8217;t work:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p>  <b>From<\/b>: X <\/p>\n<p> I tried that, but it didn&#8217;t work. Any other ideas? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> When somebody suggests a troubleshooting step or a workaround, but when you try it and it doesn&#8217;t work, you need to say <i>how<\/i> it didn&#8217;t work. The person who made the suggestion had some expectation that it <i>would<\/i> work, and just saying that it didn&#8217;t work will probably just generate an unhelpful response like &#8220;Well, try again.&#8221; Which doesn&#8217;t help anybody.\n In this example (which I just made up), a better response from&nbsp;X would be something like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;I tried that, but it didn&#8217;t work.     Virtual PC refused to load the ISO image,     putting up the error message &#8216;The CD image could not be     captured. You may not have the proper access privileges     to the CD image files.'&#8221; <\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I tried that, but it didn&#8217;t work.     Virtual PC loaded the ISO image, but when I tried to     view the contents of the CD, I got &#8216;Not ready reading     drive D.'&#8221; <\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I tried that, but it didn&#8217;t work.     Virtual PC loaded the ISO image,     but when I double-clicked the ABC file,     I got the same error that I got when I tried to do ABC directly.&#8221; <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> Each of these is a different failure mode that suggests a different course of action.<\/p>\n<p> And then the response probably won&#8217;t be, &#8220;Well, try again.&#8221; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I illustrate this point with an imaginary conversation, inspired by actual ones I&#8217;ve seen (and, occasionally, been a frustrated party to). From: X I want to do ABC, but I don&#8217;t have a DEF. Anybody know of a workaround? Somebody has an idea: From: Y Try mounting this ISO file into a virtual machine and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-14283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>I illustrate this point with an imaginary conversation, inspired by actual ones I&#8217;ve seen (and, occasionally, been a frustrated party to). From: X I want to do ABC, but I don&#8217;t have a DEF. Anybody know of a workaround? Somebody has an idea: From: Y Try mounting this ISO file into a virtual machine and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}