Work Follies

Some may think that writing software is a joyless enterprise.  In reality, it’s far from that.  Unfortunately, the humor is pretty nerdy, like below:

Someone in our software department found a bug in our software where one of the buttons was turning read instead of green.  The person who sent me the bug thought he knew how I should fix it, but after I asked him some questions, it became totally obvious that he wasn’t paying attention when the button turned red (which is his job, btw). So he was basically worthless in explaining how I could reproduce the bug. 

So, I did what we usually do and asked him to send me the software log files. I poured through the logs and quickly found several potential problems, completely unrelated to what he had told me hours before. I copied the pertinent lines from the log into an e-mail, highlighted the important part in red, and sent the e-mail off.

A few minutes later, I got this response:

Good info you found in the logs.  I will talk to a software person in the morning to see if we can make sense of why of those items are red in the log.  I’ll let you know what I find out. 

I was going to reply that it was me who made the lines red, but I didn’t have the heart, and I’m kind of interested to see how this turns out.