Oct 23

Pet Hates – “Useful” Error Messages

by in Techie :: Techno ::

I get hit with “useful” error messages on a regular basis.

Today’s little chestnut, that was driving me mad, came courtesy of the PayPal API. Paypal have a “charming” habit of modifying things on your account if you make the slightest change to ANYTHING. Of course they don’t tell you this explicitly, so I spent a good part of the day trying to add funds to our eNom account to be met with a totally useless error message. I spoke to eNom, who were very helpful, but couldn’t tell me what the issue was as it was coming from Paypal. Grr!

The other one I had was with envy. What is the point of telling me to read an error log when the error log only repeats the message “read the log” ie. doesn’t actually include the error?

Now that I’ve got that off my chest I can relax and spend the rest of the evening ripping CDs for my iRiver :)

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One Response to “Pet Hates – “Useful” Error Messages”

  1. From francis mahon:

    I get great entertainment out of stupid error messages – unless they appear on MY equipment. I’m a big fan of WorseThanFailure.COM, although some of their posts can be somewhat involved or archaic…

    Posted on October 23, 2007 at 8:05 pm #