Crying as an error message!!

I was at the semi-annual technical seminar of the Natural Gas Systems Group ( a multidisciplinary group consisting of researchers from Chemical Engineering, Engineering Cybernetics and Energy and Process Engineering and a predecessor to The Gas Technology Center) last Wednesday. A few of my colleagues kept complaining about gPROMS, or to be more exact, the unintelligible error messages that it gives. Having worked developing open equation simulation software myself, I understand that it is not possible to come up with intelligible error messages every time. Open equation solvers give you more power, but at a cost. It is upto the model builder to build the model in small steps, testing along way so that one can easily identify the code causing the error. I wanted to tell my colleagues this, but what came out was very different.

"You want to talk about untelligible error messages? Imagine this: your 5 month year old girl wakes up in the middle of the night and cries out loud. You have no clue as to why she is crying as she just had her feed a couple of minutes ago. You try a couple of things to make her sleep, or atleast to keep quiet. Nothing works. Now that is what I call an unintelligible error message. Stop whining guys - you can atleast shut your computers off!!"

And looking back, it seemed that I whined :)