There are days I fear for humanity.

Customer wrote in, one liner, nothing but the error he got when the application failed to start.

Engineer wrote back and asked for the console log, which the customer readily sent.

The failure here is that the customer could have looked at the log himself and immediately found out that the reason the application wasn't starting was because the license -- which a couple of emails later he said that he'd received a couple of days ago -- had not been applied.

Instead, it took a 10-email conversation to close the ticket.

Unbelievable.  Do they think that only the vendor's engineers are allowed to look at the Holy Writ of the Logfile?