In this particular case, the inbound captain deplaned with passengers at a layover station (bathroom maybe?), Didn't say anything to me. FO told me in the jetway that one of the autopilots kicked off, and one of the DU's was flickering briefly. To be honest, I assumed (and should have known better) that they didn't put either in the book, since both are just kinda douglassy things I've seen 717's do and aren't really operation limiting during a 40 minute turn, and often are self correcting with power transfers. Well, then local MX shows up as I get situated and look at the book and see they wrote up the DU, which was then MEL'd, and "autopilot single message." All they had to do was specify which autopilot disengaged and we could have MEL'd it and been on our way. But since they neglected to leave any more information, it required the mechanic to run a ton of diagnostic tests on FCC's etc to determine which side was faulty. Testing each of the 2 FCC's takes about 10-15 mins btw, as they have to hit about every switch and lever in there as commanded by test prompts on the FMC. This also was hindered by them not being familiar with the switch positions, so I ended up helping with that too. Then there was the full dark reset attempt, etc etc, because the thing wasn't testing right, basically because he didn't have the IRS's aligned after the first reset he tried, which somehow wasn't mentioned in the MX manual as a requirement. We aligned them after I suggested the FCC's may be happier to take a diagnostic test if they knew which way was up first. Meanwhile, my suggestions to call the previous captain and ask were also failing, because the 717 MX coordinator had been trying and dude didn't answer the phone.

Anyway, took an hour and a half delay, inconveniencing customers, crewmembers, and scheduling integrity. Because that guy couldn't write up an abnormality beyond the level of detail I'd expect from a student pilot seeing a 717 for the first time.

Inexcusable.