God damn it. Me and my big mouth. Give people an inch, and they’ll "give you nine where the sun don’t shine".

Because I had some available cycles, I agreed to update a list of known application issues that hasn’t been revised in almost a year and a half. Audaciously, I assumed that relevant but raw content about the particular application component involved would be funneled my way, and I would then reformat it and translate it into an approximation of English for general publication. This was not to be.

Instead, I now have to plow through 16 months’ worth of bug tickets to figure out which problems reported in the old document are still extant. Since the problems reported in said earlier document were paraphrased from the original tickets, they can’t be easily matched up with ticket titles. This means that in order to produce this revision, I have to go through and read each and every ticket closed since July of 2004. It doesn’t help matters that all this is within the scope of a particularly arcane portion of the application that I have never, ever worked on before.

When I pointed out the horrible inefficiency of this process, the support engineer responsible for the component (who had originally asked me to revise the list) replied "well, if you don’t read them, then I have to". Heaven forfend! There’s apparently only one other person in this whole division who might know the answers off the top of his head, and, brilliant though he is, his response time is often measured in geological epochs. I hope nobody needs this document soon, or, if it needs to be finished quickly, little details like veracity aren’t considered important.