$webpage

This is perhaps my favorite error message ever, and needs no comment.

The first question here is who could possibly think it would be okay to give a message like this to a hapless end user. But, as I saw this message every day for over a year, I also wondered:

Why does my object variable need to be set?

What does it need to be set to?

How does one set an object variable?

For that matter, how does one unset an object variable?

What is the object in question, anyway?

Why is there no perceivable difference in performance when an object variable is not set?

And, most importantly, WTF?

For a number of years I’ve been collecting screen shots of ridiculous messages given to me by poorly written programs and web pages. They need a better home, so I’ve started a UI Hall of Shame category for this purpose, because I enjoy commenting on them too much to send them to The Daily WTF. I’ll periodically post some of my favorite snippets of stupidity.

To go along with all of the new things going on in my life, the first entry is from the web page I had to use to set up automatic payments for the cable company I was hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with to get Internet access. This was a disappointing experience altogether, but the page below contains the most egregious violation of intelligence. To get to this form, I first had to enter my zip code to get to the correct sub-conglomerate site. Then in the screen before this one, I entered my account number and clicked “Register”. Having arrived at the correct site for my zip code and given my account number, they were able to look up my name and print both my name and account number back to me so I could then copy and paste the account number into the field just below where they printed it. And reenter my zip code. Or was I supposed to apply some obscure mathematical function first and arrive at some entirely more enlightening number?

Double feature: going along with the theme of making me do extra work for no particular reason is a dialog box from Windows Vista that I encountered before I finished writing this post (no, not on my computer):

“Change settings that are currently unavailable”. What the heck are they and why aren’t they available? And if that’s really true, how is it that I can change them anyway after clicking this unnecessarily ambiguous thing that may be a button but could possibly be an html link because we’re trying to blur the lines between the Internet and your computer for our devious purposes? It turns out that some extra settings lower down that are initially grayed out become active when you click that identity-crisis-laden button, though there’s no indication that you would want to follow that course of action to adjust those settings. This adheres to what seems to be the general theme of Vista, which is “hide the useful settings as deeply as possible so that they’ll never find them (phase 3: profit!)”. There is no extra functionality added, just extra work for the end users. But who cares about them?