Thanks for sharing this humorous example. Perhaps, you could propose D to spend 10 hours to try 10 things in attempt to fix we don’t know what (and of course it will take a week to find time) or get him to commit one hour of his time with you and then you would likely help him in another hour or so.

Good luck!
Alex

This story *really* happened to me today. I have to add that none of the characters are native English speakers, but English is our working language, and Oracle is the topic…

[Developer] Hello. I have been assigned a bug. This table is slow. The procedure does not run in the expected time. I want to partition the query to make it faster
[Me] Hi. Lot of stuff here…
[D] I just want some help on how to make this faster
[M] OK… let’s see… The easier way to begin is to produce a TRACE of the procedure. The trace will tell you where the procedure is spending its time. Without a trace, you can only make an EDUCATED GUESS, but this usually is not the best resolution path
… some more talk…
[D] Thanks for your suggestions. I am not very skilled in Oracle, but I plan to work with a collegue who has more experience than me. I want to fix this procedure as soon as possible, so I want to be sure to tell him the right technical words you used. You were talking to take an EDUCATED WHAT?
[M] Sorry… I don’t get you!!!
[D] You spoke about an EDUCATED SOMETHING we have to invoke on our procedure…
[M] G U E S S ????
[D] Oh, yes, it was that. Thanks. I will revert you our results.