It is amazing! Have you ever noticed how stupid computers actually are? I have been working with computers since 1988 when I bought my first AT 12Mhz IBM-compatible PC, with DOS 3.1. The same year I started working with an Apple. A lot has changed since then, but one thing remains the same: the way computers interact with dumb pop-ups and totally unusefull “information”.
Nowadays I work on both a PC and a Mac. And yes, on both computers I run Microsoft software. And really: it’s amazing: in the last 19 (!) years it seems Microsoft still hasn’t been able to give us proper feedback when some error occurs.
I have my own examples below. Let me translate the one that is in Dutch (from Microsoft Outlook 2002). It says:
“You want to close the program that is not responding (Microsoft Outlook). The program is not responding.”
Duh!
Further than that, you get the option to “Tell Microsoft about this problem”. As if you will ever receive feedback on this. It is the most unusefull information I ever saw. What am I supposed to do?
Another example, this time from Microsoft Word (Mac):
Can someone tell me what I’m supposed to do? Make up your mind! What is it? Is it to large or too small! Tell me please!
Error messages are supposed to help you solve problems. In reality, they are full of errors themselves. Let alone that you can always figure out what they mean. What adds to the problem is the fact that software get translated a lot too. And with every translation new errors occur.
Take Norton AntiVirus, which is supposed to update itself automatically. Before I got rid of it, it repeatedly would run into situations where the updater told me that it had aborted the update. But afterwards, it would happily tell me that my virus definitions were up-to-date. Which message was the correct one?
I have decided to collect these messages for amusing reading materials.
To be continued…