Acknowledgements

I am grateful to everyone that submitted questions. I’d mention you all by name but we anonymized you for publication and review. After all, it’s an agony aunt column. You bared your soul to the world, and I mocked you for it.

Thank you all. I’m sure I could have made up questions, but they would not have provided the ring of truth that your true life painful experiences did.

Also thanks to the folks involved in the publication of some of these answers in the Testing Planet.

Those of you I know were involved by name:

• Rob Lambert
  • Rob was the first editor of the Testing Planet who introduced “Dear Evil Tester” as a regular feature and promoted it so well that we had ‘real’ reader’s questions. A miracle. Thanks for laughing at my early drafts and tightening up the writing. I used my drafts in this book to avoid your heavy handed censorship and more professionally edited and tightly written prose.
• Rosie Sherry
  • Rosie took the risk of publishing this nonsense in the paper. I have no idea of the critical reception because she shielded me from such fame and fortune. Thanks also for creating the Politically Correct iconography for Evil Tester rather than my crudely scribbled drawing. I have used my scribbles in this book to add an authentic homespun charm to the proceedings, and to avoid any licensing fees.
• Simon Knight
  • Simon for carrying on Rob’s torch, excellent editing, and gathering many more questions for the answering.

And I’m sure there were other Testing Planet people involved. You all did a great job.

Thank you to the reviewers who provided comments that I fed into the editing process, and who also kindly provided testimonial blurbs that I could butcher for promotional purposes: Gojko Adzic, Richard Bradshaw, Paul Gerrard, Andy Glover, Dorothy Graham, Rob Lambert, James Lyndsay, Rob Sabourin, Huib Schoots.

Any remaining errors are mine, and either intentional, or due to my poor grammar skills. You can decide. And remember, I do so enjoy starting sentences with a conjunction. And writing partial sentences¹. Stop reading now if you can’t handle it.

Thanks also to my family: Billie and Keeran, for putting up with my answers to their questions. The quality of the answers you read here is representative of the quality of answers they receive at home. Just imagine how badly my answers impact my son’s homework.

And thanks to you, dear reader, for joining us.