My best version of this was supporting a customer who had decided that the data source files were corrupt, in a part of the application workflow that doesn't access the files (an automatic 'preanalysis').
- Okay, so what does the error say > "The data files are corrupt".
- No, that doesn't sound right, can you please read it out word by word? > "The. Data. Files. Are. Corrupt.".
- I haven't seen that error before, can you please read it out letter by letter so I can ask the programmers > "a-u-t-o-m-a-t-i-c a-n-a-l-y-s-i-s h-a-s n-o-t...".
- Right, go here and tick the box that says 'enable automatic analysis'. Then it will work.
Yes, specifically asking to read word-by-word didn't work, I had to get down to letter-by-letter.