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As inbound marketers, we've all experienced it. The extremely frustrating and productivity-debilitating error message that either makes you want to pull out all your hair in frustration, fall to your knees and scream, or just break down and cry.
So the next time you experience one of the following "why me?" moments, remember, you're not alone...
10 Error Messages That Make Marketers Cry
1. "Microsoft ____ Has Stopped Working" You know the feeling. You've just created the first 10 slides of your awesome new presentation in PPT or finished up some crazy complicated pivot table in Excel. Or maybe you just completed the first few pages of your new ebook drafted in Word when ... BAM! Microsoft Office crashes. Right before you've had a chance to click "save." You've lost an hour's worth of work, it's time to start from scratch, and the depression is starting to sink.
2. "We're sorry. [Insert Browser Name] had a problem and crashed." Bye-bye unsaved blog post and strategically placed tabs -- your faithful internet browser has just crashed. And you can just forget about figuring out what click-path you took to navigate to that super helpful article with that awesome statistic you need for your presentation/blog post/email send. What was the name of that website again?
3. "Are You Sure You Want to Delete?" Yes ... wait ... NOOOOOO! If you've ever conveniently had a brain fart or perfectly timed nervous twitch when that message has popped up, you can likely relate. So long content, full landing page, and video whose original file location is impossible to find. Accidental deletion is not easy to recover from.
4. "Post Successfully Published" The root word "success" makes it sound like a good thing, right? Not when that tweet was meant for your personal account, not your business' company account. Let's just hope it wasn't too inappropriate.
5. "Your upload failed." Picture the scenario: You're uploading a particularly lengthy video to YouTube, the upload status bar is at a promising 99%, and up pops this error message. Thanks for leading me on, YouTube...
6. "Delivery has failed to [insert recipients' email addresses]." This happy little message usually appears after you've sent an email including too many file attachments or those that are too big to handle for the recipients' inbox. Bonus: you'll usually receive these errors about 10 minutes after you thought your email was successfully delivered.
7. [Insert Image of a Whale Being Supported by Twitter Birds]: Aaah, the good ole' Twitter Fail Whale. A regular character in the early days of Twitter, this whale has been known to make random appearances even today. Nice try posting that tweet. Now it's literally time to wail.
8. "Error Code 4506." Right, as if I even know what that means! At least tell me why . I'm not Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code. Nor do I have the time, the desire, nor the capability to decipher your codes!
9. "The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like update the Adobe Updater now?" Congratulations, Adobe. You win the award for snarkiest error message ever. For serious? An update that depends on other updates...which depend on even more updates? There goes an hour of my productivity.
10. [Insert Image of the Blue Screen of Death] The mother of all error messages. If this one doesn't make you cry, no other error message will. Thanks computer gods. Goodbye hard drive.
Other error messages got you down? Seek some support in the comments.
Image Credit: Andrew Mccluskey
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