Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Oops!

Those of you misguided poor souls who attempted to access this site yesterday in some vain attempt to find amusement or diversion will have encountered an error page. One of those things, I'm afraid, and a little glitch, so sorry about that.

But at least it was a proper fail page, that's all I'm saying. Something sufficiently stark, soulless and grumpy. Just some unpleasant text on a blank white page telling you the site was fucked. And I rather like that. I don't like those juvenile, overly zany ways of telling you that something's gone wrong. You know, the sudden 'Oops!':

Oh, oops! Oops I can't do this properly! Oops you've been wasting your time trying to get things to work. But 'Oops!' - how long would you last in your job if you turned over a customer and then grinned in their face like a nutter and went "Oops!" - about five minutes? They'd take you to the fucking cleaners, if they hadn't quite rightly punched you in the face. Oops? Oops?! What kind of world is this? Do people not think we can't take bad news in normal words? Why do they have to kneel down and treat you like a preschool kid?

Then there's a whole other level of infantilism: "Aww snap! And look, while you're being annoyed by us not doing what we're supposed to, here's a nice picture we did for you, a little cartoon, which will tap into that really childish part of you that's severely pissed off with things not working properly and make you hurl your laptop over the garden fence and into the allotments. Look at the cartoon face! Look! See, we're not all bad! We do fun stuff too! Hey, it's cool! We get to go to work in a nice building where we can ride skateboards and go down slides, so we can do cool pictures of cute stuff when things go wrong. That's what you want, isn't it?!" No! Just make the fucking thing work in the first place! Make it work, and then I won't hate you; then I won't want to hunt you down like the dogs you are.

There's the Twitter Fail Whale as well. Look, we know you're annoyed, but here's a big cartoony whale and some birds, eh? You'll like that, won't you, eh? Because you have a mental age of about three, eh?

No! I won't like it! What I want is for you to fix things. Don't give me fucking cartoons to try and distract me. I'm not some fucking cat that you can wave a furry mouse on a stick at while you bundle me into the basket and take me to the vets. That won't work. I won't think "Ooh, well, that didn't work, but at least they entertained me with the pretty picture and the Kindergarten attitude!". No! I want a stark screen that looks like something's broken, properly broken. I want a baffling and confusing error message that I can't understand in the slightest, to convince me that something technical - so advanced that I have no way of understanding it - has exploded, somewhere.

More than that, I want an apology. Fuck the cartoon page with a scarf on. Fuck that to the deepest depths of hell. Fuck the whale and the tiny birds. Fuck the 'Oops!' and the baby talk. Treat me like a fucking adult, like a customer that you'd like to retain, and offer your humble apologies and regrets that you've managed to screw everything up for me. Is that too much to ask? Why must I be treated like a baby just because I'm online? What happened to customer service all of a sudden. When did 'Oops!' become good enough?

Anyway. For those of you who did try to access the site yesterday and couldn't, I'm very sorry. Deeply, deeply sorry. I won't say 'Oops!', I'll just say sorry. I prostrate myself before you and ask for your humble forgiveness. That's all. Is that OK?

* You may well say to me, and you'd be right, that I often on this blog use the phrase 'Oops' or 'Oopsy'. And I do. But never when I have turned you over. Not when I've done something wrong, and annoyed you. If I did, I would be the most ghastly hypocrite, and you'd be more than welcome to drown me in boiling jam.

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