In a follow up to bitching about doing support I have to go again. Long ago in my company now several times gone I used to joke with Silverstr and ScoobyD and the guys there about an email we got from the QA department. It was a word document with nothing but a screenshot of text in a terminal window in it. I joked that I’d reply with a BMP of a word document with a screenshot of a word document containing a file with the words “next time just cut and paste the text” or something like that.
$Dude who emailed me the issues earlier called me again tonight. The “oh it’s fixed now” had changed back to “there’s an error”. So I asked him on the phone if he could duplicate it. “No.” I asked if she could send me a detailed way to duplicate (ie: click here, click here, etc), and he wanted to call me tomorrow at lunch to walk me through it. I tried again to just get an email with a list, but no. Of course, if I can’t duplicate the error, what exactly can I do again?
So he forwards me the email he got from the client. It contained these words:
Hi
Error
A runtime error has occurred
Do you wish to debug
Line:46
Error: object expected
and an attachment….
A PDF….
Of a view source page from IE….
That’s been printed out…
Written on….
And scanned or faxed back into digital form. (See image)
Oh. My.
Towards the bottom of the page a line has a large arrow pointing to it (line 46 I guessed). Nothing really there. An HREF link with an onclick and onmouseout links. Looking at the page in a validator that’s not even the right line pointed to. There is also no indication in the PDF what page this came from, just the helpful title “^TransientScriptDocument0.txt”. Luckily there is an indication in the html code of the page itself.
Funnily enough I just looked at this some more and did duplicate the error. Nothing like I was told of course, it’s something that happens on the mouseover or mouseout, but JavaScript is not my bitch, so I’m going to have to pass on this. Of course, the solution is “turn off javascript error reporting in IE.”
Bigger sigh.