this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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NPCs (NonPolitical Comics)
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You are giving end users too much credit.
I get like a half dozen emails a day about "an error message", which I always have to go back and ask what the message actually says
The replies to these are always screenshots, because if it wasn't they may have accidentally read it by mistake
About half the time, the error message is "credit card on file is expired" or "12a-482-223 is not a valid phone number", or some other thing that makes it impossible for me to send an email reply that isn't condescending, but when I just say "it means your credit card is expired", I get thanked for how prompt I was at solving their problem
Yeah, I don't think they realize what a bad analogy this is. Hell I'd argue it's straight up faulty analogy fallacy. Computers are designed to be useable by humans and programmers want users to know the fix to the problem. We've had to reverse engineer how the human body works but the computer and software is man made. The problem isn't your hemocrit is 7.3 it's your credit card expired, this program is in an unusable state please close it and reopen it, your computer needs to update please restart it, the program can't get new messages because the computer isn't connected to the internet.
Use OCR to change it into text and then send the whole error back without the image. See if they notice.
These messages are rarely more than 6 words, so OCR is kind of overkill
If the error requires a developer (me) to look into it, I capture it in the backend - the only messages I pass on to the client are those a 6th grader could understand