Something’s wrong. The error message appears. Odds are good that you don’t read it, and instead just click whichever button you’re used to clicking. O how wrong that is!
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\nI admit to this mistake myself, but I see it a lot in my kids. Whenever I help them with a problem, they plow through an error message like a Californian obeys a Stop sign.<\/p>\n
Thwoosh!<\/em> That’s the sound of an error message window flying by. What did it say? Who cares! On to the next step!<\/p>\n The programmers are most likely to blame for this situation. Traditionally, the computer error message is next-to-useless.<\/p>\n I remember on my old Mac, getting an The PC is ever worse, but in the other direction: DOS error messages were verbose and cryptic. What does that mean? How did it happen? Is something wrong? Was it something I<\/em> did?<\/p>\n Error messages are often irrelevant, as computer history shows. Even if you have a reference to the number, the meaning is utterly lost. That’s because error messages are often written by the programmer for the programmer.<\/p>\n As computers became more user-friendly, some of the error messages changed. Sometimes the error message was kind of useful. It might explain what went wrong, but not what to do next. Or it might explain what to do next, but not what went wrong.<\/p>\n Well, at least they were trying.<\/p>\n A recent question on the Slashdot nerd news site asked whether anyone could explain why users typically dismiss error messages without reading them. The person posing the question pointed out that often error messages hold meaning and are important. Yet, for some reason, people dismiss them and keep moving on without even regarding what all that error message text said in the first place.<\/p>\n I can’t verify any of what I wrote in the previous paragraph because I also immediately dismiss most error messages when I get them.<\/p>\n Microsoft tried to focus your attention with Windows Vista’s obnoxious UAC warnings. The screen would dim. A beep would sound. Then you would immediately ignore the warning’s message as well as its color code, to click the Allow button. Who cares what the warning was about!<\/p>\n Obviously even trying a trick such as a delay, or having the computer’s voice synthesizer read you the error message wouldn’t help.<\/p>\n So when the error message is important, what would cause you to actually pause and read the darn thing? Any suggestions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Something’s wrong. The error message appears. Odds are good that you don’t read it, and instead just click whichever button you’re used to clicking. O how wrong that is!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1261"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1276,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions\/1276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Error -2<\/code>. What the hell was that all about? The -2 didn’t help you recognize anything, and there was no manual that listed all the error messages, what they meant, and how to deal with them.<\/p>\nError L891-A: Franistat duplicator overflow.<\/code><\/p>\n