rzepi

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.

My favorite was a recurring issue where, in an accounting system, there were two reports. One displayed the running summary of all cash in all accounts. The other one did that, but also ended the quarter, cleared the ledger, and started a fresh new quarter.

One user in particular kept running the second report too early, when they intended to run the first report. Then they'd call in a panic, wondering "where did all the money go?!"

It already had an ARE YOU SURE? prompt in front of that report. But the user blindly clicked YES without thinking. Every time.

So we added a second ARE YOU REALLY SURE? prompt after that, and moved the YES button someplace else. The user quickly adapted to that.

The final thing that worked? We replaced the ARE YOU SURE? prompt with a requirement that they type out the phrase YES I REALLY WANT TO CLOSE THE QUARTER into a floating text box then click OK.

The first time they encountered that they called us.

Asked us about "the weird new error" and what they had to do to get around it. We asked, "it's not the end of the quarter. Do you REALLY want to run that report?"

After thinking about it for two seconds they said "nope" and hung up.

Jason Anderson (British Artist, born 1970)

"Untitled", 2025.

Oil on Wood Panel, 60 × 80 cm.