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Helpdesk Form Letters
In my ongoing crusade to provide useful information to IT Professionals and find ways not to work, I'd like to present you with form letters you can use when your users bug you with problems. Let's face it, those users are always whining and complaining about something, so why not give them form letters to moan about too? It'd be a little something extra you offer for no extra charge.
The Physicist - Thank you for reporting your problem. As you may know, we recently installed quantum computers in our web center. Quantum computers use the power of multiple universes to work many times faster than regular computers.
I want to assure you that while right now you might be upset, in another universe the program is working correctly and you're actually very happy. In fact, you told me how great the program was and how gripey the "other you" is. From now on, we're only accepting emails from the other you. We're sure you'll understand --- at least one of the you will.
The Klingon - You have challenged the honor of our programmers and must now defend yourself! Prepare for the ancient Klingon ritual of Death-Or-Debugging. Bring your screen print and Batleth. Afterwards we will drink the bloodwine of Java and sing songs of the old C Programmers and their fights against the leaks of memory. K'Plah!
Do not speak of this matter again.
The Politician - Thank you, dear sir, for your kind advice and letter regarding our program. I especially liked your comments regarding my mother and her animal friends. Who knew so many syllables could be joined together with so many oinks and still make a sentence?
I want you to know that we study these issues quite thoroughly. Right now we have special commission set up just for errors like yours. I need your support in our continuing struggle against our competitor's programs, which actually kill small bunnies when they run. Obviously, the death of so many bunnies must be stopped at any cost, and I appreciate your gift in support of our noble cause. A mere one or two thousand dollars can buy you a seat at our next dinner event in which many people will be thinking of the various bugs you are experiencing. You can also bring hundreds stuffed into a briefcase.
I know I can continue to count on your support. Thank you for your gift. And remember the bunnies.
The Philosopher - We perceive that you are experiencing errors based on your recent bug report. By 'perceive' we mean that commonly held belief among most other people, or outside stimulus that we also perceive as people, would agree that your report was actually due to our program malfunctioning.
But what is a malfunction? Obviously the program was acting in its nature, and as it struggles in its path we will all be richer for that struggle. Who's to say that when the program works differently, that that also is an error? Is it so bad to stop working? Can we impose our value system on the program in and obvious andro-centric manner?
If your perception can be altered so that the program is not in error, is it not better for you to do so?
The Preacher - Thank you brother Smtih for you recent voice mail regarding our program bugs.
I have felt the Lord move me to lay hands on the nefarious device and I have beseeched the heavens for relief from this terrible affliction.
We will remember you in our prayers.
The Lawyer - Your missive dated 07 June has been received at our office.
Is it not true that you were using the program when it malfunctioned? Is it not true that you, on the night of June 7th, were in fact
You can step down now, sir.
You will be billed for $127.65
The Surfer Programmer - Dude. I got that bug report you sent. Turns out it was an unallocated memory segment which got overwritten in a buffer write. I should have went with a larger cache, you know? Those new bodacious smart pointers are gnarling too. That new 16550 UART -- well we never should have been writing driver-level code anyway, you know? It was hosing the heap and the stack, and whoever used mode 0 should be freakin now.
We're gonna re-calibrate our register usage and re-rip the whole shebang, dude. If we keep slamming more virtual interfaces into our class library the whole object map is going to go tubular. Just makes the constructors too phat and we got slicing going on all over the place. Too many volatile members in threads is making the whole graph freaky-deaky.
Right on.
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