Like Talking to a Wall

When we publish Technical Alerts, it's not because someone has a writing bug. The process of getting one published is pretty complex and follows this path:

1. Someone sees a need for a TA and either writes a draft (or "draught" for you UKians) or asks someone else to do so
2. Draft sent to area members for assistance/suggestions
3. Completed draft sent to other area person (often me) for clean-up
4. Document submitted
5. Request sent to an area expert for approval
6. If approved, documentation department checks for conformity
7. Questions directed back to area expert
8. Once everything is resolved, the Technical Alert is published
   

This can be an infuriating process when we have a hot issue with P1 or P0 priority (i.e., warn people not to do something recommended by Microsoft lest their entire system stop working) but most of us work well together and I've written TAs which were published within 6 hours of my writing the initial draft.

Such is the case with a TA concerning Microsoft's patch 912812, something wholly unnecessary which breaks ActiveX functionality to comply with the order after MS lost the Eolas case (quite possibly on purpose). If you install this, our application will throw up a dozen confirmation boxes on each instance for each user. We're not the only company affected by this, but we're big enough (or our "partnership" agreement with MS is strong enough) that we helped in getting MS to release patch 917425 which repairs the functionality broken by the recommended patch.

We had that TA written and published inside three days back in February when the initial developer version of the IE update was released.

I wasn't surprised when I saw a ticket today called "TA #nnnn" since the damned patch was released yesterday. After almost six years here, I shouldn't have been surprised by the full explanation of the problem.


Customer: We have to apply 912812. When's your patch going to be ready?
Me: We're working on it. No ETA.
Customer: In the meantime [sic] a workaround is required.
Me: Apply MS patch 917425 like the 912812 documentation tells you to do.
Customer: We don't want to.
Me: Too bad.
Customer: We want a solution.
Me: That is the solution! It's Microsoft's solution. They even say so.
Customer: No, we want you to provide a solution today!
Me: Our solution is to use Microsoft's solution.
Customer: But we don't want to apply another Microsoft patch.
Me: You don't want to apply a MS-provided patch which would cost each user five minutes without affecting any other user, but you do want to apply our patch (which we haven't finished writing and testing), the installation of which would take your system down for all users a few hours if you do everything correctly.
Customer: Yes!

My cubicle neighbour Frankie is a nice enough guy, especially when I start his day off right with a few pictures of unclad wimmenfolk, but even that kindness I show only goes so far. He finds the the noise caused by increasing the my-head-shaped-dent in my desk excessive and he complained to management. No more nekkid pix for him this week.

Root Cause:3-3rd party (MS-OS)
But you know damned well that the response from this guy richly deserved a 17.