Ironic Error Messages - Funny, but unnerving...

These two error messages (from Gizmodo reader Kevin Barbee and This-Is-Broken contributor ryenski, respectively) may be funny - very much so, in fact - but ultimately these kinds of things undermine a user's faith in the system delivering them. After all, it's not that "an error has occurred but the system's on top of it, no need to worry" - instead, it's more like "an error has occurred, and the system just blew up trying to deal with it, run for your lifeaaagghh [small fire starts here]." It's the kind of thing that makes you just a little scared to hit the "OK" button...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen! Always drives me crazy!

bjax said...

i wish i had screen caps of the following two messages:

1) my computer was experiencing a rather serious BiOS issue (redundant?) and displayed this message: "An error has occurred." [OK]

2) i tried to save something in excel. the error message: "The document has not been saved." [OK]

love the blog.

Dave Gustafson said...

Thanks, Ben! And yeah, isn't it true that the [OK] button is too often the only option in a situation that is definitely not okay...