The paradoxical sense of relief when instructions to solve the problem fail at the first step

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Developer Blogs.

I couldn't get something to work. The details aren't important. I found a very old internal wiki page that listed a long, complicated process for getting the thing to work. I strongly suspected that it wouldn't help, but out of thoroughness was obligated to give it a try, so that if somebody asked if I tried it, I could say "Yes, and it didn't work." It failed on step 1. Yay! This is so much better than failing on step 23. Now I could ask for help with a slightly clearer conscience.