I be broke

19 June 2006

So there I am, peacefully logged into my US Bank online account. Everything is going well. We're having a nice dialog. I click, it responds. I click... now I'm looking at a plain, white page with the following scrawled across the top in courier font:

an exception occurred: Unable to complete your request at this time, ReferenceID = "wl26*2006-71-59-03:21:11:742*XLP3-594861"

Imagine what the scene might be if I were speaking to a human teller and suddenly in our interaction I received a response like this. I imagine the likes of a scene from the Exorcist. The breakdown in the expected flow is extreme.

On the one hand, US Bank is not a little entity. They have plenty of money for technology solutions. On the other, I understand that exceptions occur. Here's a gentle reminder to degrade gracefully and if you can write something to the screen, make it useful, somewhat reassuring, and perhaps apologetic. There's no good excuse for barfing your undigested exception in my face.