Rant alert…
Lately I’ve run into several error messages that were smart enough to know exactly what I wanted to do, but just called me an idiot and offered no help. The one I consistently get is from our stove when I try to use the timer. There are two start buttons on the oven, one is “start timer” and the other is just “start”, which tells the oven to start heating up. To use the timer, you must hit “timer”, enter the time, and then hit “start timer”. If you hit “start”, it beeps and a little message scrolls by saying “press ’start timer’ to start timer”. If it knew enough to beep and scroll the message, why didn’t it just skip they annoyances and start the friggin’ timer?
I hate it when a system knows enough to tell me exactly what I was trying to do, but just calls me a donkey and irritates me. If it knows that much, it should just go “ok, I know what you meant, lemme go do that for you”. It’s different than asking “did you want to do a? or b? or…” because there are options for what you wanted to do. I refuse to believe it’s easier to develop a system for displaying the detailed appropriate error message than to build the system to fire off the operation for you. Sigh.