So in programming, we have a concept called 'rubber ducky debugging'.

Oftentimes, when you are completely stumped by a bug, and have tried EVERYTHING to debug a problem, you ask someone to come over and help you. You start to explain the what the problem is, and why it makes no sense, and about halfway through the explanation, you realize exactly what the problem was the whole time, without the other person every having said a word. Basically, the exercise of laying out all the steps in the problem code verbally, and showing off the code that implements those steps, makes the issue obvious.

In order to avoid wasting other people's time, programmers came up with 'rubber ducky debugging'. You take a rubber ducky and ask it help you. You start to explain what the problem is to the ducky, and why it makes no sense, and about halfway through the explanation, you usually realize exactly what the problem was the whole time.

So, I think I invented anti-rubber ducky debugging. I was convinced that one of our internal libraries was unable to do something I needed. I tried and tried to get it to work with my program, and it just wouldn't. I composed a long email to our internal programming email list (with several thousand software engineers on it, including the ones who maintain said internal library), complete with an simplified example showing exactly where the internal library would fail, and sent it off. I then returned to my real code, at which point I quickly realized:
  1. That my real code didn't match the simplified version in a very important way
  2. That the difference would completely explain the problem, and
  3. That the simplified example actually worked just fine but I had never actually bothered to put it into a test and run to check it would fail in the way I was sure it would fail.


So instead of a single inanimate object, I managed to waste the time of several thousand engineers while figuring out my own problem.