You idiot – Set Your Calendar to Gregorian Instead of Lunar!

A month ago I posted about the "Best damn iTunes error message ever". Well today I found one that just might be even better. I am attempting to setup an interview with ikordo (CN coverage) CEO George Waidell. We used ikordo to select a time. After the system found an appropriate time, I received an email with an outlook attachment with the calendar details. I clicked it and when Outlook attempted to open the file, this is the error message that appeared:

Boy do I feel like an idiot. You know all of my life, I have always tried to think in the Gregorian format and never got anywhere. Now Microsoft has helped me to understand that viewing life using the Lunar option will make things right.

This might even be more exciting than the IE7 Dr. Watson Postmortem error. In my former life, we spent days working on error messages on large applications. Why is it that Microsoft has their developers create error messages? Perhaps if they used their marketing staff to create the error messages, then I would understand what in the hell they mean in the one above.

So as you work on your apps, don't leave error messages out. Think about what your customers will think when they see your error messages. Will they understand what they need to do? Good error messages can help reduce customer service and technical support time.