Design

email from my father

I don’t know why, but my dad does love stupid interfaces. Perhaps it is the human in the […]

I don’t know why, but my dad does love stupid interfaces. Perhaps it is the human in the machine, revealing itself…

In Lotus Notes email, if you have an email message open and click on the
“delete” button, you get this error message: “Cannot remove NotesDocument [sic] when instantiated [sic] by NotesUIDocument [sic].” I just LOVE that one! It really reads like parody. (And doesn’t explain why there IS a
delete button if it won’t work in that view.) I suppose it shows I have a geek sense of humor, but I find it very funny.

3 Comments

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  1. 1
    George Girton

    C’mon, you’re not saying that you _don’t_ love that error message, are you? “cannot remove NotesDocument when instantiated by NotesUIDocument?” That has gotta be one of the best, si?

  2. 2
    Ed Brill

    40,000 organizations around the world use Lotus Notes. Do you think that perhaps, possibly, a few of their users are able to successfully delete e-mail?

    Have your dad call his helpdesk. Sounds like someone b0rked the mail template.

  3. 3
    Griff Wodtke

    Um. I called my help desk and asked them what “borked” meant, but they just laughed and hung up. I thought it might mean that an evil enemy had taken over the computer, from the Borgs on Star Trek, but no, Mr. Brill has it with a “k.” Maybe he meant “served an ace,” from Bjorn Bork, the tennis player? But that makes no sense in this context.

    Finally, I concluded that Mr. Brill must be the person from Lotus who wrote this particular error message, since he seems not to have grasped that my point was its incomprehensibility to normal people. The person who wrote it, after all, must have thought it was completely understandable, which would explain why Mr. Brill erroneously thought my complaint was that I couldn’t delete mail, when it really was about the phrasing of the error message. Or “user unfriendliness” of the error message, if you prefer.

    Seriously, Mr. Brill should have read the post more carefully before deploying his sneering sarcasm. It boomerangs.

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