Sometimes it's not even rare that documentation is wrong. The documentation for a vendor who I won't name - but might be at Series J and worth north or $50 billion - seems to be wrong more often than it's right.

We frequently say, don't blame the tools, it's you. That pushes "blame the tools" outside of the Overton window, and when we need to blame a tool, we're looked at like we have five heads.

Ten years ago, I was dealing with a bizarre problem in RHEL where we'd stand up an EC2 instance with 4GB of memory, have 4.4GB of memory reported to the system, and be able to use 3.6GB of it. I spent _a long_ time trying to figure out what was going on. (This was around the time we started using Node.js at that company, and needed 4GB of RAM just for Jenkins to run Webpack, and we couldn't justify the expensive of 8GB nodes.)

I did a deep dive into how the BIOS advertises memory to the system, how Linux maps it, and so forth, before finally filing a bug with Red Hat. 36 hours later, they identified a commit in the upstream kernel, which they forgot to cherry-pick into the RHEL kernel.

That's a very human mistake, and not one I dreamed the humans at Red Hat - the ones far smarter than me, making far more money than me - could ever make! Yet here we were, and I'd wasted a bunch of time convinced that a support ticket was not the right way to go.