I had to file a bug, a couple of weeks ago, which read something like:

“Monthly reports for xyzzy corp don’t seem to work; I can see data in the DB tables but when I try to run the reports I get an empty xml file.”

About a week went by, because the developer on the xyzzy corp project has a zillion things on his plate, and I get a response which can be summed up as:

“Are you sure you were doing it right? You’ll only get results under conditions x, y, and z. Please try to reproduce it, this time with debug mode turned on (here are instructions on how to do that), and give me (this particular log file)”

This is developer-speak for “I’m busy and don’t want to look at the code. Here’s some tasks for you to serve as a delaying tactic while I work on other stuff.”

Anyway, I did the stuff he asked for. The log file he wanted didn’t turn out to be very large, which seemed odd, but I sent it along anyway.

His response, and I give him credit for being man enough to admit this, was:

“Oh, I forgot. I commented the monthly reports routine out.”

OK, it’s probably only funny if you’ve spent time as a QA geek, but trust me, it was hilarious at the time.