Little man syndrome. »

Little man syndrome.

Posted on December 27th, 2007 in Main

Did you ever wonder why as soon as you give some people a title they go all out of control? Let me give you an example of something that happened to me. As you know I work in support so its my job to help the customers of my employer configure their software. Most of our employees are out on vacation, my boss included. So “someone” was carbon copied on my email thread, then this “someone” that has nothing to do with support sent me a nasty email from home.

This is the history of the issue, customer emails me telling me that he is receiving an com error. I ask for his configuration, no help but now I know what he is using, so I ask him to look at a diagnostic window and tell me what he sees.

This is what I receive from the someone:

Maybe this customer has had some other communications with you in a separate thread but…
Why aren’t you asking more questions as well as providing more detail in your responses? Asking for the project file makes sense but don’t we need to know a bit about the overall application and network architecture here?
Such as:
What changed?
How long was the project working fine before the first error message?
Does the message post often or is it intermittent?
How many client applications are connected to Server?
What is the number of active items (check lower right status bar of window)?
Is it possible that someone was programming the device or took it off line? (how many people have access to it)?
What is their network architecture? How many devices on the network? What switches and hubs exist?
Any changes to the network architecture? New nodes added? Any new large amounts of data passed across the network that would affect the connection between server and the device?
Finally, isn’t a diagnostics capture (without additional instructions) going to potentially have a ton of active items and be a huge mess for someone to attempt to diagnose? Isn’t it a bit premature for that?