Self-help book: Define your own defect severity

You've found a new bug but you aren't sure what the correct severity for the defect is? Welcome to the "This is no exact science" club

Here are some general hints how to solve this question that I already shared with some of you over IM:
1) Treat Bug severity standards as guidelines - see the first line in the document, it clearly says that the document is written as guidelines and that ultimate responsibility for bugs you find is yours

2) Worried about how will Critical severity affect production, developers? Are you also worried about global warming and dying rainforests? If so, how does this help you define the severity of the bug you just found? The answer is: it doesn't

3) Wondering why your Low severity defects describing features not working still aren't fixed after two months but are considering to make this one Low severity as well? Rethink this again

4) Put yourself in the customer's shoes. What is your reaction to the newly found bug?
   a) I don't like the product and I won't use it
   b) This is very annoying, I won't use the product because of it... much
   c) I can't use this feature as I wanted to but I see the workaround exists - kind of annoying but I'll get over it
   d) I don't frequently click in the top right corner 3 pixels next to the Ok button and cause the mouse pointer to glow red - I'll forget about this by tomorrow

5) Make sure that you've put yourself into 80% of the customers' shoes - if you are thinking as someone who used to code Commodore 64 games in assembly back in the 80's and know how to get Linux distro kernel version, then a chance is this issue may only be visible to you

6) Contact your QA team members to see if the apparently Critical issue is easily reproducible by at least one more team member; maybe your VM OS stopped working after months of abuse

7) Devs insist on reducing the bug severity you've set and you're scared, best to comply? No - stand by your decision especially with facts you determined before defining the severity

8) Severity can go both ways, both you and devs have solid facts about the case. Contact analysis team for recommendation. However this should be an extremely rare case if you follow #7 above

9) Still not sure? Notice that I haven't answered any of the questions above with definite answers, when to use which bug severity. This is entirely up to YOU. As you have the ultimate responsibility for quality of our products and ApexSQL brand in general, you also have all the power needed to affect the quality with bugs you find

Note: if devs are giving you hard time, let me know directly ;)