Did you forget your password AGAIN?

Michael Geary | Thu, 2004-09-09 16:56
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If you’re old enough, you may remember when software tried to be “user friendly.” This was before we had Interaction Designers, Usability Consultants, and the like. Nobody was quite sure what “user friendly” was supposed to mean, but it sounded like a good idea.

Sometimes it meant “easy to learn and use”, and that was a good idea. Other times it meant “be friendly to the user”. That didn’t always work out so well.

Windows XP tries hard to be friendly, but there’s one place where it annoys the heck out of me. No, it’s not the doggie who does tricks when you search for a file.

It’s the error message when I mistype my password at the Welcome screen:

Did you forget your password AGAIN?

Every time I see that, I have to stop myself from reading it as “Did you forget your password AGAIN?” And I want to reply, “No, I didn’t forget my password, you blithering idiot, I mistyped it! Do you have a problem with that?”

Then I remember it’s just a computer, it doesn’t know any better, so I just have to excuse its poor manners.

Submitted by Tonetheman (not verified) on Thu, 2004-09-09 22:55.

This reminds me of the message that you would get if you somehow shut down Windows 98 incorrectly. I do not remember the exact message, but it went something like this: “If you had only shutdown your computer correctly you idiot, I would not be having to check out the filesystem right now.”

The real problem was that most of the time I would have shut the damn thing down correctly if it would have allowed me to do so. You would think that such a poor OS would have had a little less of an attitude.

:)

Submitted by Michael Geary (not verified) on Fri, 2004-09-10 01:54.

That’s a classic, isn’t it?

The exact message is “Because Windows was not properly shut down, one or more of your disk drives may have errors on it. To avoid seeing this message again, always shut down your computer by selecting Shut Down from the Start menu.”

That’s right, Windows. I didn’t shut you down. I meant to, I really wanted to, but I couldn’t. You crashed!

Submitted by chaoszcat (not verified) on Tue, 2008-06-10 07:55.

Haha, it’s terrible but I seldom met it coz I didn’t set a password for my old desktop

Rather, I set password for my MacBook. So when you typed a wrong password, it will simply clear the input box, and shake the login screen for around 0.5 second, then you just continue to type. Cool rite? I love it.

Submitted by Visitor (not verified) on Thu, 2008-09-18 06:05.

Its just a computer - but there is no excuse for the programmers and designers who coded it that way. A VERY simple fix would be to have a setting somewhere that would only display that message after the xth time. Even TWO times would be a big improvement.

This is yet another example that Bill Gates and the other weenies at Micro$oft think the rest of the world is idiots and THEY know better.