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I hate how casual website error messages are now. You know, those little error notifications that pretend to be your friend so you don’t have a panic attack when the site you’re on stops working? They’re the chummy ones that use slang and emojis. I hate those things.
Last week, Gmail was all like, “Whoops, activity had a glitch!” Don’t “whoops” me, Gmail. You’re a THING — you don’t get the luxury of saying “whoops.” Only human people can say that. Also, you can’t just say “activity had a glitch.” That is way too vague. I have no idea what you mean by “glitch” and I have no idea which “activity” you are referring to. How do you expect me to tell my boss that I’ve completed my third mundane task of the day if Gchat is down? Oh, you want me to get up and go to his desk? Nope, I only get up when the chocolate is restocked in the office kitchen, thankyouverymuch. I can’t believe you have the nerve to just “glitch,” Gmail. You had no trouble working properly earlier this week, so I don’t appreciate your casual attitude. Also, I need to know what my people are doing for lunch, and I can’t do so now because you’ve decided to have a meltdown mid-workday. Like, I know it’s Wendy’s Wednesday, but are we sticking to that or has Gina decided to restart her new year’s resolution again? This is day-changing shit, Gmail. Without you, my boss thinks I’m slacking, and even worse, I might not eat. You are being too cavalier. I need you to CARE.
The week before that, Twitter was an unnecessary slut a couple of times. First, she was all like, “Oops, looks like something went wrong.” Again with the “oops.” The only difference between that and “whoops” is the “wh-,” both equal in infuriation level. Also, no shit, Twit. I can see that something is wrong because my cleverly worded tweet is currently not being shared with my followers. They are waiting for me, Twitter. They need me. What’s wrong with you? Then you have the nerve to pull this move on me: “Locked out! We’ve temporarily locked your account after too many failed attempts to sign in. Please chillax for a few, then try again.” CHILLAX? I’ll show you “chillaxed,” Twitter, and it leans more toward “axed.” I will kill you. It’s not my fault that I got super high and thought the government was hacking into my accounts, which consequently made me change all of my passwords. Give me my life back.
To top it all off, then Instagram decided to get sassy. God, Insta, you’re so stupid. She goes, “Sorry, performing some brief maintenance, be back soon :).” At least she apologized, but in my experience, there is no such thing as “brief maintenance.” There’s been a man in my kitchen for five hours trying to change the lightbulb. I should probably remind him about the “lefty loosey, righty tighty” rule. Whatever. What exasperates me the most about that little message is the smiley face. You cannot tell me terrible news and then SMILE, you animal! That move has been claimed exclusively by flight attendants. If you would just tell me what the issue is, I would relax, even if there’s nothing I could do about it.
All I’m saying is, nope. You don’t get to be chummy with me, internet. I miss the days when my computer gave me error messages that confused me with words and symbol combinations that I didn’t understand. That would be like having an angry Italian yell at you. You have no idea what is happening, so you just wide-eye nod and then run away. You come to your senses mid-yell, thinking, “Got it, this is over my head. You do you. Figure your shit out, I’ll catch up with you later.” Other times, the messages reminded me of trying to make a left hand turn when you’re in the far right lane. Microsoft Word would say something like, “You have to close this and then reopen that and then click and drag it here.” Now you’re thinking, “Oh, okay, that’s where that is. I fucked up, I fucked up. Sorry, I panicked — I’ll figure out my shit and then we’ll try this again, bro.”
Regardless of which of those problems you had, you knew how to react. I need websites to tell me what’s up so I know if I have to do something about it. You can confuse me, but don’t patronize me. That pisses me off almost as much as automatic emails that address me by name in the subject line — but that’s for another day..
Image via Shutterstock
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@dannugget
@dannugget
You seem incredibly angry, all the time, at everything.
I don’t know about you, but I like it.
Kind of a turn on, really.
This is a lot of words about a very inconsequential thing.
damn, i read the title at first as errant massages a little too casual
Dannuget, if the programmers knew what the error was, and there was a way you could fix it yourself, they’d just program it to automatically fix your fuckup or let you know via validation messages.
Otherwise, it’s an error they didn’t anticipate, which means the only thing they could give you is the exception warning from the runtime, which either 1) you can’t fucking understand and can’t do anything about it, or 2) you can understand (*nerdalert*) it, but even if you could correct it yourself, they’d prefer not to let you know about the internals of their system for security reasons. Thus, the super vague, comically casual catch-all error screen.
Also, the particular sites you mentioned are down/buggy for what, like 15 whole minutes?
I assume you’ve had the elastic band torn out of your underwear at least twice since you graduated college, because even the real world can’t protect nerds like you.
HTML-embedding up in this bitch.
Jeepers! You must be The Smartest Man on the Internet!
Alternatively, it’s my job to know how web applications work. I don’t accuse my mechanic of being an elitist when he diagnoses why my check engine light is on.