Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Dots is important

So I get an email from my IT guy saying that if we haven't already upgraded to WhatEver ver 8.02 we would be vaporized or something. Not being particularly anxious to get vaporized or something, I start to feel a little angst. I click About WhatEver and I see that I am at ver 8.0.2.

Hmmm, 8.0.x would be older than 8.02, but I've never seen a version number incremented with a leading zero after the point.

Am I OK because IT guy is sloppy about version numbers, or am I a candidate for the poof-mobile? Or am I just an anal-retentive technical writer?

I made a screen shot of my version splash screen and sent it to IT guy and asked if he really meant 8.0.2.

A DECENT human being would have responded, "Oh, my bad, I got sloppy and caused you unnecessary angst," and then he would have sent out a new e-mail clarifying his error to the rest of the company, but NOOOOOOOOOOOO. I got "You can ignore the notice."

You'd think folks who work with software day in and day out for a company that develops software would get version numbers better than IT guy.

So what did I learn today?

I'm an anal-retentive technical writer.

4 comments:

David Farbey said...

Glad you realise it's your fault, Mike. You don't want to go round upsetting those IT guys. If you're not careful you could come in one morning and find that you no longer have any version of WhatEver, HowEver, or WhichEver, let alone WhatTheHeck, installed on your machine, and then where would you be?

MattBNH said...

Even more fun when a reviewer complains "The Java version is 5.0 Update 6, not 1.5.0_06" Even though the Java About box says "Version 1.5.0 (build 1.5.0_06-b05)" but the Sun download page says "5.0 Update 6" just like smartypantsreviewer says. Can an Engineering Group be anal-retentive-challenged?

Unknown said...

Anal-retentive tech writers catch more than sloppy version numbers from sloppy IT guys, and thereby often save users from additional unnecessay confusion (and sometimes serious bugs).

Rhonda said...

Thanks MattBNH -- you just reminded me of that horrible Java version site, which is where IT Guy tells you to go to 'get the latest version'. Problem is, you can't figure out from their site exactly WHAT version you need and IT Guy just says 'the latest one [and don't bother me again, dammit!]'. And it's not just Sun -- Tomcat and Citrix XenApp versions are similar. Multiple versions with little to differentiate them for the non-IT Guy user. Like anal-retentive technical writers! ;-)