B10[mg]

I probably blogged about this before, and people around me have heard my rants on this many times before, yet I feel the urge to blog on this now: ignorant l-users.

For some reason, a lot of people think error messages exist only for one reason, to annoy them. Popups, other error messages, not relevant, just call B10m, he knows/should know everything.

A lot of times, I receive e-mails telling me that the email is not working. After many times, I refrain from replying "it seems to work rather well, I got your message". Those senders usually mean that some email got bounced. So of course I ask them why and they usually respond with something like: "That's what I would like to know".

So I start explaining that if they received a message claiming the delivery failed, it most likely also tells them the reason for this. Either some zealous spam filter, blacklist, or the recipient's mailbox is full (yes, that still exists too). Anyways, in 99% of the cases, it will tell you why the delivery failed and if you're lucky it even provides you with a link that explains it in more detail.

But of course they deleted that bounce report and I have to start guessing what went wrong. The tea prices on the Chinese export market, alignment of certain planets, any BOFH excuse ... it really can be anything.

Or, like I noticed today, someone claimed to get an Internal Server Error and was friendly enough to pass it on to a coworker. He forwarded it to me with the question: "What is he doing wrong?".

I have to admit, the 500 Internal Server Error isn't too descriptive to the end user, yet the least you could do is tell me when this happened, and what caused this behavior. Makes debugging and going through logfiles a lot easier. But of course, I should have known exactly what the guy did wrong...

Or what about a broken laptop? I received a phone call from someone, who told me the laptop was hanging. Rebooting didn't help, it kept on hanging. During the booting, some text was displayed, but it would hang again after that. "What the text said? Oh I don't know!"

"B10m! This stupid program isn't working! What should I do now?" For some reason, some people think that I am watching their screens constantly, which is -of course- not true. I watch it sometimes, but not constantly ;-) So, I walk over there to check out what's going on. "Please replicate that error, so I can see what's going on". And before you know it, I see an error popup, but within 10 microseconds it was gone again. "Let's try again, and try to click that OK button with a little delay, so maybe I can read parts of it this time".

Computer users please remember a few things before you call your local victimcomputer guy:

• We are not watching your screen so we have no clue what you're doing
• We usually do not know what you want a program to do
• We do not like spending evenings, even weekends on your problem
• We don't ask you to paint our house for free either
• We do have other (useless) things to do besides fixing your stuff
• We do like you to search online for a solution
• We do like to hear what the error message said, even though we know you couldn't care less

l-users, error messages