this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Most people don’t even read the error messages. They’re never gonna read a whole manual.
Most people were conditioned by more "user-friendly" systems to ignore the content of error messages because only an expert can make sense of "Error: 0x8000000F Unknown Error". So they don't even try, and that's how they put themselves in a
Yes, do as I say!situation.It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.
Well, to be fair, I'm also not very well versed in the intricacies of connecting with British nobility.
Have you tried turning the rape island off and on again?
One day I'll catch that jerk Peer! So rude, always closing my connections!
It's very much on brand for Peer, at least in the beginning of the play https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_Gynt
More than once I had trouble calls about an "error message" that basically said "everything is fine, click ok to proceed"
In the admins defense. "Closed by peer" can indicate everything from a safe closure to an unsafe closure to a server connection terminating which causes the peer to terminate.
Like that's a fair point of confusion.
What bugs me is when the error says something stupid specific and obvious such as
JavaScript heap out of memoryordd: error writing *pathname*: No space left on deviceYeah, but they literally couldn’t tell me if it’s a problem with the network or something else. It’s like it’s in a totally different language
yea thats fully understandable. also no idea why this post just showed in my feed, didn't mean to revive a 4 month old comment 😅
That’s the beauty of the fediverse :)
But most error messages are in plain English first (plus some numbers and codes).
No, they see white (gray actually) blocky text on a black background, they think the machine is broken and go into panic mode. Instead of reading.
Which is kinda what you said.
Nah. Most error messages today are:
System unavailable. Try again later.orSomething went wrong. :( [Contact Support](And 'contact support' just takes you to their main support website homepage where you can maybe search something up on their janky search engine from the 10,000 useless 'articles' on their support site. Or you can talk to an AI chatbot that hallucinates a solution for you that sounds correct, but actually doesn't work.)
I don't need to make sense of error messages. Which is good because I usually can't.
I just need them copy/pasteable cuz that shit is going in Google and I'd rather not manually type it.
People who don't read error messages or do not take the time to see what is going on and just come to the technician/mechanic/doctor saying "it doesn't work" or some half-assed hypothesis piss me off so bad.
I know that at some point we all do a little of this in our lifes, but some people don't seem to be able to read one goddamn paragraph ever.
I had a problem with my car. It felt strange while driving. Made some unusual noise. Then a bit later the motor warning light came on.
I went to the garage, told them about the warning light and what I noticed the time before, what I suspected and such. A short while after the mechanic came to me and asked for a few details, as my description "wasn't helpful" and the repair would be much faster with more details that told them where to look etc. Turns out the guy who checked in my car only noted "a warning light is on" and nothing else of my ramblings.
So sometimes it's also paying attention to what might be important and relaying information.
ah well, then that is them being stubborn and being unable to troubleshoot.
To be fair, I forgot an important bit of context. I was on vacation abroad when my car broke on a Friday afternoon. Our hotel room was only available until Saturday morning as everything was booked out for the weekend because of a huge event in the city. They asked me just to get a first indication and not waste time with random troubleshooting, so that I could get home and get everything checked completely with a more relaxed schedule.
From my view, it was a sensible thing to do. But the literal translation on their report they showed me was just "the warning light is lit" - not even which (though that is quite obvious, when you start the engine)
To be fair 'warning light is lit' is all the mechanic needs to know in a lot of circumstances.
Most of the time, the warning light comes on because the engine's computer has logged an error code. The mechanic just plugs his code reader in to find out what the code is and then looks up what it means. And ~90% of the time, the engine's computer does a pretty good job of telling the mechanic what's wrong.
(For example, if it gives a code for "Cylinder #4 misfire", then the mechanic knows he should probably check the spark plug and coil for cylinder #4. And if those seem fine, get out the compression tester and test the compression of cylinder #4. And without any additional information from the customer besides 'warning light is lit', that's probably enough for him to find the cause of the problem.)
To be fair, techs don't usually talk to the people who can read, so they're only ever going to see idiots. There are competent people in the world, they'll just never need your help, so you don't see them.
Last time I called tech support, it was for a Dell, and I interrupted their speech to tell them I already looked up the diagnostic. They asked which numbers were lit on the error panel to confirm I had the right diagnostic, and passed me directly to who I needed to talk to. I only called tech support because the cpu socket died and I was putting in a warranty claim, otherwise they would have never even heard from me because I could just install a new motherboard myself.
edit: speeling
THIS. The people who actually read the error messages aren't going to stop there, they're going to look up said error message, find a solution on their own, and continue with their day without having to interact with another human.
At this point, if a student brings in a laptop, explains what doesn't work, and leaves me to diagnose and fix it, I consider it a good report because it means that the student didn't get any overconfident ideas. If a student also explains what they were doing when a thing failed, I'm giving them preferential treatment.
Then there are comp-sci students who attempted something. I had one who disassembled their laptop and tore a ribbon cable. I had one who plugged in a random mis-matched RAM stick that turned out to be busted and wondered why Windows kept crashing. I had one who completely fucked up the registry. I had one who wanted to install Ubuntu for dual booting and accidentally wiped the entire SSD.
I would rather spend an hour babysitting their computers than an entire afternoon un-fucking something they thought they could handle. If it were up to me, I would restrict the crap out of their user accounts, but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they're smart enough.
To be fair, you're only seeing the dumb ones.
If that user-installed RAM stick had worked, they wouldn't have come to you about it.
If they had installed their dual boot Ubuntu setup correctly, they wouldn't come to you about it.
Presumably, there are a lot of smart students out there fucking with their laptops without breaking them, which you never know about because they never bring those laptops to you to fix. And locking down the computers would prevent those smart students from being able to do the things they want.
I guess I forgot to point out (six months ago, well done) that these are free loaners provided by the university. Usually high-end, current-generation hardware. They can be smart on their own devices, that's neither my concern nor my responsibility, but these are not theirs to disembowel.
Are these laptops provided by the faculty?
In any case I do not mind so much the "I should try to fix this on my own first". If it's your own device and accept the risks/consequences. But if it is a work/university provided laptop then it makes no sense to attempt to fix it on one's own.
I can feel your pain trying to fix/repair something you have to figure out what kind of stupid stuff was done to the device.
They're provided by the faculties at the university's expense, but the students have admin rights and very little supervision. Two fairly expensive laptops have been stolen by exchange students during the three years I've worked there -- they simply never bothered to return them, and we only realized it during the yearly inventory check. But fixing the asset tracking system (or implementing one in the first place) is not what I'm getting paid for.
I'm more surprised that your school doesn't go by the "Wipe and reimage" policy. Most every school now uses some form of cloud service. No reason to spend time troubleshooting when you can just do a stock image and have the student sign in again
They’ll refuse to attempt to understand the problem then get mad when they get ripped off.
What about the fucking manual?
Kama Sutra?
I guess you get good at Unix and refrigerator by reading it, so why not?
Don't fuck the manual!
It's Read The Fucking Manual not Fuck The Reading Manual
They don't.
Undoing self-owns like ignoring available information is the basis for 40% of the economy.
And because people don't read error messages, many applications/sites/etc don't even put them, or if they do they either don't have any public facing documentation to actually figure out what that code means, or they do and it might as well be nothing
I recently had a coworker who would frequently get an error message while completing their time card. The message was slightly cryptic, something like "invalid cost center", but no indication (in the message) of which line(s). This happened so often, that when they would call me to complain that they were getting an error, I usually already knew what error they were getting, but for some reason, they could never remember the steps to find & correct it and had to call me every time.
The error message:
that's why any manual worth their salt has a "quick start" section at the beginning (I say this knowing most man pages fail at this or put it at the end which is super unhelpful)
Just give me common uses and flags, you can have your more indepth stuff at the end