It’s passe, I guess, to make fun of bad error messages. How 1997! But still, this is hilarious and disappointing (seen while browsing a dynamically updating website).

Transaction (Process ID 98) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

Here’s a nice bit of rhetoric from my local library (sent via email – a nice feature)

Subject: Courtesy Pre-Overdue Notice from Your Library

94037 PORTIGAL, STEVE L

The item(s) listed below are due back soon. This courtesy notice does not list everything currently on your record, just those items thatare due in the next few days. http://catalog.plsinfo.org For questions, please call your local library.

Pre-Overdue? That’s just ludicrous. And insulting. It places the customer’s actions into the category of prohibited, suggesting you are already a violator.

Are we pre-violating the speed limit by driving 2 mph under? Are airline travellers potential terrorists?

For all the protestations about protecting liberty in the face of the Patriot Act we’ve heard by librarians, you’d think the library culture would be a bit more sensitive to the impact of their language choices (being a library, and all that, dealing with words as their primary item of exchange). Screw you, library, for telling me I’ve almost committed a violation. My books aren’t due until they are due, and don’t treat me like an overdue-book-holding-patron until I reach that point.

(chances are this is an automated feature of some IT purchased by the library system by some vendor, where neither the customer (the library) nor the software company gave any thought to thinking about design, brand, communication, customers, etc. but They Love Infstracture and Cost Savings, so off we go. Yuck).

Today I received this email

To: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
From: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
Subject: Disk Usage Warning (critical)
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:51:58 -0800

The account with the username ‘stevep’, is running out of disk space.
Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota.
You have currently used 90.85% of your disk space.

Talk about useless! It’s autogenerated from myself, to myself. It doesn’t make any reference to what organization, site, company, or anything, except for stevep – you can imagine that I’ve got many accounts using the name stevep. I eventually ran an nslookup on the IP address in the header (yeah, that’s what I did and for most people what I just wrote is complete nonsense) to see that it came from my ISP. But I have two domains registered with that ISP! They don’t tell me which one, they expect me to map the login to the domain? Even their support person couldn’t tell me what domain this account name referred to; he suggested I tell him all my domains and then he could tell me which one this was? I happen only to have two, but what if I had 30? Or 300? I’m sure that’s not unusual.

Very very crappy error messages, and of course, the usual technical-oriented support that doesn’t feel this is really a problem they need to address.