…and if you recognize THAT message, then maybe you can identify with this story. I was doing database development for a collection agency (hey, it was paying work, and as collection agents go, granted that it would not be my profession of choice, they were nice, professional guys) and the agency was using Mac Pluses.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? You’ll see in a moment, because it’s an example of how the computer industry doesn’t take error messages seriously. At one point my program blew up, displayed a cartoon-like time bomb with fuse a-burnin’, and proclaimed that “An Error of Type 1 Has Occurred.” I called Apple and got an engineer on the phone, relating my tale of woe. He cracked up laughing. “That’s the only error we have!” he said, a lot more entertained by the situation than I was.
My point is that it does no good for software companies to provide cryptic, hexadecimal error codes, and give you hints on how to use the hex-to-decimal feature of Windows Calculator in combination with the MSDN website to decode their English-like meaning, if said software companies then leave you with nowhere further to go. When I discovered that my “Element not found” error was not documented anywhere that a good ten minutes of Googling could reveal, I was pretty ticked off at Microsoft for making me go through a lengthy exercise with no payoff. It brought back bad memories of Myst, which I was neither smart enough nor dedicated enough to figure out. Then again, the tech note *did* say that the error was going to be “complex” – which I now understand means “poorly documented by us” in Microspeak.
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Event 4375, or… The Terminator
