Page Not Found

Once again, I found myself spending the day fighting with my computer. While trying to simply read my emails, my browser instead continued to either show me nothing or asked me to kill the page and try to load it again. Those times where I did opt to kill the page and reload, I would get a frowny face on my screen. Error messages annoy me to begin with, but when you get as many error messages as I got today, it takes that level of annoyance to an entirely different level. As most of you probably know by now, the more I see something in every day life the more likely I am to start to notice new details and thus begin to slice that particular thing to shreds. So you can imagine how viscous I can get when that item is already on my bad side and I keep seeing it. In this instance, around the 15th time I saw this frowny face I noticed that it had changed since last time I had this problem. For the last couple of months the frowny face had a scarf around its neck and a few snowflakes floating around. This morning the scarf and snowflakes were gone. I assume this happened because it is officially summer and the programmers wanted to be accurate with the seasons. But, rather than enjoying this little attention to detail, it just made me hate that stupid frowny face even more.

I can't stand it when companies try and use cute little things to try and distract you from the fact that their product is a piece of crap. In the last year it has become more common for businesses, especially when it concerns their websites, to not just give you an error message when something doesn't work correctly. Instead they try and soften the blow by showing you a cute picture or a witty phrase to let you know your file has been corrupted. Now, if you are working on something for personal use, not only will it probably bother you less, you might even have a chuckle if it is particularly clever. But if it is a work-related issue than that is really not the time for humor. Honestly, I don't care how cute a picture of a cat hanging on a branch is, it will not do anything to soften lessen the impact of an important document being lost forever. In that moment you become very aware that this clever error message is probably how someone in tech support spent an entire afternoon and it suddenly seems like a giant waste of time. You want to send them an email asking if they really thought taking 20 minutes to brainstorm on what would make for the cutest error message versus fixing the problem so you only have to see it once every few weeks instead of 10 times a day was the best use of their time.

Also, I don't think we should be celebrating the websites which do have funny messages when something goes wrong. This is the same reason I immediately become wary when a doctor's office has an extremely comfortable waiting room. On the surface it seems like a good idea to have comfortable chairs, lots of new magazines and classy artwork on the walls because it puts the patient as ease. Plus, we all expect to wait a little bit at the doctor's office, so a comfortable waiting room shows the doctor is sympathetic to our plight. However, what actually happens when the waiting room is too comfortable is the doctor no longer feels the urge to get to his patients on time because he knows they won't complain about being in the waiting room for so long. I certainly don't want my doctor rushing through his appointments to set some kind of speed record, but I also would rather he not think he can make me wait for an hour because I can keep myself occupied. Give me the doctor whose waiting room consists of three folding chairs, a TV which only gets one channel and a year-old "Highlights" magazine in which all the puzzles have been filled in over the guy with the over-stuffed couches and flat-screens on his wall any day of the week.

Clearly, I am all for creativity on the internet. But at the same time I would rather not have to see these snappy comebacks all the time. Rest assured, no one will mind an error message that is bland as hell if they only have to see it twice a year, because I know one of the things I appreciate even more than a clever error message is no error message at all. This policy is not exclusive to company websites, either. I don't want employees spending a lot of time picking out the the most kick-ass "Hold Music" playlist, because that is time which would be better served getting me off the phone. A customer asking to be put back on hold because the music is so great only happens in commercials. The rest of us want to get our issue straightened out as quickly as possible, so leave coming up with a soundtrack for our day to us. Only when they have all the other problems solved can these companies go back and get all their "failed SNL-writer" angst out by making their "Page Not Found" icon extremely clever and their hold music feature nothing but Grammy-winning musicians. Hopefully this message will get through to the right people, because I swear if the next time I see that frowny face it is wearing sunglasses, I'm going to give the person who does the programming something to really frown about.