I think the greatest electronic achievement that mankind will ever have, will be to create computer error messages that actually make sense to the average person.
Most times, the message you get on screen is just a baffling as the reason why it is there in the first place.
Oh sure, I could go online and look up a list of common computer errors, but that still won’t help usually.
What we really need is an easy to read, detailed message that we can pass onto out tech support people. A message that truly outlines what may be going wrong and how long it might take to fix.
If this occurs, people just might start to understand their computers better and get more comfortable with them.
Of course, that can never happen, lest our tech support “geeks” lose their mystique and perceived value. We need to continue thinking that errors are all dangerous warnings that must be heeded unless we want our laptops to delete their own hard drives.
We must never know that in most cases a simple “turn it off then back on” procedure is what is needed to fix the problem.
No. We must never know.
3 Comments
Your mouse (keyboard) is unplugged would probably be helpful to IT folks sanity.
In the old MSDOS times, we had here in Spain this joke:
“¿Quién es el general Failure y qué hace leyendo mi disco duro?” (“Who is Gereral Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?”)
Your joke bring me a smile and a tear for the good old times :’)
Our wonderful computer system at work is one of those Hi-Tech error message systems. No one ever knows what they mean.