[dexen]

>Unless it's one of those cursed things installed at the customer thousands of miles away that never happens back in the lab.

I had a bug like that in my previous (telcom embedded dev) career. Ended up driving to the customer premises (luckily mere 200km), working two weeks on collecting traces for the repro, and a day on the patch. Once I figured out how to trace the repro, the rest was trivial - the bug was glaringly obvious in the trace. Which in hindsight means I didn't really need to drive there at all, I merely needed to properly implement tracing the repro, and send the built artifact to the customer.

The problem would have been trivially solved if I had sufficient experience with tracing, or found a colleague with sufficient experience. However this one time the experience was bought & paid for with the trip.

[vardump]

> Which in hindsight means I didn't really need to drive there at all, I merely needed to properly implement tracing the repro, and send the built artifact to the customer.

In the alternate reality where you chose not to drive there, you'd now be complaining how it took 3 weeks to troubleshoot with the customer and how you should have really driven there instead.