OK, back when I was dealing with well degreed idiots for a living, there was a situation I ran into constantly. The software database had two tables that caused a fair amount of stupid. One table was the “cost and revenue” table which then fed into the “project status report” table. The project status report table was designed for one function and one function only - the system used it to print the project status report. Who knew? It’s not a friendly table to try to use for any other purpose, end of story. On countless occasions, I had people calling and asking how they could use the project status report table to build an external report. Given that’s not it’s design or function, we have no obligation to try and help you figure this out. In fact, if you actually want to build a report and *know* what you’re hitting on in the tables, you use the cost & revenue table. It has all the same data, but in an actual comprehendably organized fashion, which the report table doesn’t. Over and over again I told people, “Don’t even waste your time trying to use the report table, just go to the other table and use that. Trust me, you’ll be less frustrated in the long run.” And invariably there would be a bit of snarking over the fact that they should be able to use whatever table they wanted, and I would tell them they were more than welcome to, but we weren’t going to help them with it anyway, so they should be happy we were at least pointing them in the direction of the more user-friendly table.
I’m still on the Yahoo newsgroup for my software, I don’t know why I stayed subscribed to it, but I’ve been a member of it for years now and I still find it interesting the things that pop up there from time to time.
Today a message popped up… “I’m trying to use the project status report table to build and external report and it just isn’t working…” No shit, sherlock. I recognize the user name, and I’m pretty sure we had this conversation before.
