Abject and Total Wasn’t Bad Enough…
Working in Milwaukee this week, where blogging inspiration goes to die. However, I resurface just long enough to regale you with the following error message from Microsoft Access, which assaulted me as I was trying to save a report form I’d spent an hour or so on:
If they had any imagination, they’d have little animated mushroom clouds billowing in the margins. At least give me my money’s worth of entertainment.
OK, let’s see if I remember everything I did.
Yes, you’d think they could think of something that would send someone completely off the edge. I like the ideas of animated atomic explosions. They should consider some additional colorful alerts, too:
“Abandon all hope, ye whose application ran here.”
“Cataclysm. For god’s sake, run.”
“Fatal error. No, really. It’s fatal”
don’t scare me like that! i’m 99% done with an access app. i do “save” every other moment tho.
i like the “ok” in that message. too bad there is no “cancel.” and what sort of “help” is there for catastrophic failure? did your computer spit out a martini?
At least it didn’t have to scan your private sector!
I just attended a usability presentation that included a number of great MS error messages, including one that was a message to the localization engineers, saying “If you didn’t get the email we sent about this error let us know.” But none of those were so fine as the one that used to be in the MIDL compiler that said “Weird compiler error. Try to find a workaround.” Fortunately MIDL’s not a Microsoft tool that many people ever have to deal with.
Brought to you by your terrormeister friends at the DHS,
no doubt–masters of apocalyptic rhetoric