Worm with Problems💫

Time loop

Body swap

Some members of the team get shrunk (and have to go inside someone's body)

All the male members of the team are turned into simpering idiots by pheromones and have to be saved by the female member(s) of the team and I guess this is feminist somehow

Time loop

Everyone on the team is trapped in their individual worst nightmares and the episode is called "Fear Itself"

Someone goes all "Heart of Darkness" on an alien planet

Trapped in a VR simulation (but you can die for real!)

The team is brainwashed into serving in the workforce of some alien planet

Lotus-eater plot (everyone is trapped in an idyllic fantasy world)

Time loop

One or more members of the team "de-evolve" into cavemen

Someone on the team "evolves" to have super-intelligence (and this is bad)

Alternate timeline where the villains have won

Cut to ten or so years in "the future" except it's not real or has to be undone

Ill-tempered child has reality-warping powers

Time loop

Mundane member of the team gets superpowers

Superpowered member of the team becomes mundane

Everyone starts acting like teenagers

They go back in time and one of the members has a crush on someone only to find out it’s their or someone else’s parent

Two people swap roles to prove that they have it worse than the other

It’s a wonderful life parody

Someone gets split up into their different personality traits

Cute creature is actually a multiplying monster that eats everything

Evil twin

Least sophisticated person has to pretend to be nobility

Involuntary time loop

🎶i could take you to the🎶

🎶first🎶

🎶second🎶

🎶third floor🎶

vs.

It’s Not a Plot Hole, It’s Just Something That They Opted Not to Spoon-feed You Because It Would Be Obvious If You Thought About It For 20 Seconds

vs.

It May Be a Plot Hole, But It Still Works In Terms of the Story’s Themes and Character Logic

vs.

All Works of Fiction Represent Constructed Realities and by Demanding a Lack of Plot Holes, You Are Improperly Importing the Rules of Objective Reality into a Subjective Creation that Must Be Judged Primarily on Its Aesthetic Merits

vs.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was: