[benjoffe]

While the story at the end about the bug report is humourous, it's a pretty mean thing to do. Perhaps 3 days lost work was longer than the expected damage, but one would imagine it would waste at least a few hours of someone's time, which is not something I'd feel good about.

On an unrelated note, sometimes using a computer not configured to British English I get spelling corrections for words like "humourous" above, as a sanity check I usually Google the word, it would be really helpful if Google displayed a message that it was the British version of the word, instead of displaying: "Did you mean humorous?".

[m_for_monkey]

Interestingly, while humor/humour is a US/British difference, humorous/humourous is not, the latter is just rare/unusual.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humourous

[benjoffe]

Ah I see, thanks, there are certainly better examples though, after a few minutes I found 'unshakeable'* which google tries to correct to the American version, yet is standard British English.

* https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=unshakeable (even makes the mistake on the UK Google site).

[waqf]

> rare/unusual

Or "misspelt/misspelled", as we prescriptivists like to call it.

Though when I see hypercorrections like "humourous" on the internet, I begin to suspect that people are using UK/Commonwealth spellings because they think they should, not because they're actually more familiar with those spelling conventions.

[pestaa]

The first thing I would have done if I was assigned to this case is to check whether it is really a bug or just a feature.

[Splines]

3 days does sound like a long time if you're an expert in the product.

If they weren't, then those 3 days are very likely well spent.

[JadeNB]

Are you sure that it wouldn't have taken you 3 days to check that?

[pestaa]

It'd take me 3 weeks to check since I'm really poor at this level of math. Probably the reason I'm not going to maintain such software. ;)