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This week, anonymous Franz starts us off with a catch-22. "I opened MS Word (first time after reboot) and a dialog box opens that tells me to close a dialog box. This was the only open dialog box... I guess even software makes excuses to be lazy on Fridays."
While Error'd and TDWTF do have an international following, and this week's offerings are truly global, we are unavoidably mired in American traditions. Tomorrow, we begin the celebration of that most-revered of all such traditions: consumerist excess. In its honor, here are a half-dozen exemplary excesses or errors, curated from around the globe. They're not necessarily bugs, per se. Some are simply samples of that other great tradition: garbage in.
Opening from Poland, Michal reported recently of a small purchase that "The estimated arrival was October 27th. But, for a not-so-small additional fee, AliExpress offered to make an extra effort and deliver it as soon as... November 3rd."
Jani P. relates "I ran into this appropriate CAPTCHA when filling out a lengthy, bureaucratic visa application form." (For our readers unfamiliar with the Anglo argot, "fricking" is what we call a minced oath: a substitute for a more offensive phrase. You can imagine which one - or google it.)
This week at Errr'd we return with some of our favorite samples. A screwy message or a bit of mojibake is the ordinary thing; the real gems are the errors that are themselves error dialogs. We've got a couple of those, and a few of the ordinary sort.
Stealing the worm, pseudoswede Argle Bargle comments "Generally, Disqus works well. I can even imagine the border conditions that cause my time-travel glitch. I'm even glad that the programmers planned for... for just such an emergency. Maybe it's even good programming. It's still very silly."
No, it's generally not nice to pick on people who fumble a second language. But TDWTF isn't here to be nice, it's here to be funny, or at least interesting. If nothing else, our final submission this week qualifies as interesting, after you go haring off down the trail of ambient context following your kreiselkompass.
We start with an anonymous submission from a reader who writes "The English in this config dialog isn't great so I guess I'll play the game in the alternate language, Ҝ-{ΐ." Personally, I'd stick with Hyphen.
To atone for last week's errant Error'd, this week we're giving you 20% extra at no additional charge. For reals.
An anonymous submission starts us off. Ordinarily we wouldn't repost from social media but this is just too delicious.
Two of today's ticklers require a little explanation, while the others require little.
Kicking things off this week, an anonymous reporter wants to keep their password secure by not divulging their identity. It won't work, that's exactly the same as my Twitch password. "Twitch seems to be split between thinking whether my KeePass password is strong or not," they wrote. Explanation: The red translates to "This password is too easy to guess", while the green 'Stark' translates as "you've chosen a very good password indeed."