It doesn't work

Most days, someone will pop up at the Plone mailing lists, chat room or in my inbox saying something like “I tried to do X, but it didn’t work.”

It may be irrational, but this annoys me so much I want to be rude to them. They took the time to  ask for help, and then they included no useful information to help anyone help them. It’s doubly annoying if they’re talking about software I wrote or documentation I provided, since it implies there’s a problem with it, but gives me no chance of fixing it (or defending it, as it may be).

So, the next time something doesn’t work, ban the phrase “doesn’t work” from your vocabulary and think:

• What exactly did you do (be specific, i.e. break it down into steps)

• What did you expect to happen?

• What happened instead?

• Did you get an error? If so, describe it and supply any error messages

This isn’t terribly difficult and won’t take you very long, and it will get your issue resolved much, much quicker and gain you more respect.

Phew (again).