That faulty UI message you fixed? It's come back and no-one knows why

Seven years ago today we installed a water feature in Dabbs Mansions. It was an impressive vertical fountain with a splash radius of two metres. In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to install it in the utility room.

I don’t even remember ordering it. The first I knew about the whole thing was returning home after an hour and a half of copious sweating in the gym (the laces on my trainers are so difficult to untie) to find my wife even more drenched than myself.

Naturally, I was taken aback to see Mme D standing in two inches of water in the utility room. She was garbed in an oilskin and rubber wellies, completely wet through and holding a mop in one hand and a plunger in another.

Goodness, I thought, was it Saturday already?

What I believed we had installed was a new washing machine. The previous day, some nice men took the old one away, plugged in the new one, ran a supply-and-drain test, then left.

Less than 24 hours later, we decided to try it out with a full wash – at which point the new washing machine, with all its blinking lights and computerised controls, decided to reconfigure itself into a dumb fountain pump and reconfigure our utility room into an indoor Lake Geneva.

I would have loved this as a child: I often fantasised that I could be one of The Champions. By preference, I wanted to be the (pre-sitcom) William Gaunt character because he seemed kind of dopey and that's a look I perfected from infancy.

The pump worked brilliantly. Unfortunately, the drainage pipe didn’t.

A plumber was duly called and he proceeded to reproduce the fountain effect three times: once to confirm the problem, a second time to make absolutely sure and a third time, I suppose, just for fun.

For readers who find tales of domestic white goods thrilling and stories about plumbing curiously arousing, you may be fascinated to learn that the culprit was the external drainage pipe being completely blocked by roots.

For me, though, the fascinating aspect of this otherwise bland anecdote is that a drainage pipe that had been entirely root-free for the previous 18 years since moving in to the property would suddenly become blocked solid quite literally overnight. These alien-like roots grew at an uncannily accelerated rate, from “non-existent” to “100% blockage”, in the few hours between the new washing machine being tested and us actually using it.

To add to the Twilight Zone feel to the day, the fridge blew a fuse and a lightbulb in the shower chose that moment to begin flickering.

MmeD found the experience annoying and unsettling. But as I patiently tried to mansplain, albeit while standing waist-high in swilling turds as I cleared roots from the blocked drain in front of the house, there is nothing mysterious about stuff going wrong in unlikely ways. Nor is there anything bizarre in the synchronicity of multiple unassociated devices going wrong at the same time.

They are doing it on purpose. Why? Because it amuses them.

I defy any reader to tell me they don’t experience this on a regular basis at work. System faults and service outages never occur in isolation but in what appear to be concerted, progressive scenarios of self-destruction, orchestrated by the Old Digital Gods.

Has your server died? I bet that’s the moment your backup server also chooses to start teetering, while your Restore routine inexplicably does a Jason Bourne.

Has your website gone down? That’ll be because your bosses launched a £10m digital marketing promotion the previous day, the site developer is on vacation and the hosting company support centre is on fire.

Truly, the Ancient Ones are wicked buggers, intent on causing maximum difficulty while lending the strongest whiff of weirdness to anything touched by their interfering tentacles.

My suspicions in this respect were first confirmed some years ago during a dev project, whose freaky scenario would be worthy of Astounding Tales comic in an episode entitled The Cursed Dialog of Thoth.

As a matter of course during usability testing, I logged a minor issue involving a pop-up information message window that read:

Please ensure the child element is linked to it’s parent.

I’m sure you agree such a mistake hardly compares with, say, the world refugee crisis, but I politely asked for it’s to be changed to its. The wayward apostrophe was traced to a language file and duly eliminated with a backspace.

Two weeks later, an update to the system was rolled out and the UAT process recommenced. Shortly after, I stumbled across the following pop-up information message window:

Please ensure the child element is linked to it’s parent.

How the heck did that get back in there? I logged the typo again, which once again was traced to its language file and nixed.

Not long after this, we were treated to another update. And I was treated to the same sodding message with its arse-wipingly unnecessary apostrophe:

Please ensure the child element is linked to it’s parent.

This time, even the developers were looking spooked. According to their investigations, the update had not rolled back to a previous language file as suspected, since all other corrections to it had remained intact. It was as if the system had decided to retype that stray apostrophe all by itself.

The text file was corrected yet again and pushed out to clients. A bunch of us were dispatched around the building to log in from various workstations and see if we could reproduce the erroneous message. We could not. For hours we checked, double- and triple checked. I even had one last go just before clocking off for the night. Phew, I thought, at last I can go to bed knowing that I have done by duty to protect my innocent users from the horrific prospect of inaccurate punctuation disrupting their on-screen experience.

The next morning, however…

Please ensure the child element is linked to it’s parent.

“What the FUCK...?!” wailed one of the shocked devs in their office aquarium when he saw it. Questions were asked at the 9am stand-up, 10am sit-down and 11am prostrate meetings. Questions were raised in the House. Red telephones lit up in the Bat-Cave. The issue was escalated to the UN, the pope, Master Po, Gandalf and that pontificating twat played by Alejandro Jodorowsky in The Holy Mountain.

Long after I departed the project, I learnt that this message had to be corrected several more times, even rewritten using phraseology entirely without possessives, only for it to occasionally revert to its evil original for no logical reason.

Some years later, I found myself back at that company and noticed many of the wage-slaves were using a slick new iteration of the system.

I couldn’t resist.

Discovering without any surprise that my nine-year-old username and password were still valid, still granting me admin rights that by all rights I had no right to have any more, I attempted the impossible: I tried to assign a child element without checking that it had a parent. And of course…

Please ensure the child element is linked to it’s parent.

I still think this is marvellous. Just when you worry that everyday life is rational and dull, it’s brilliant to be reminded that you can always trust the Old Gods to keep cocking things up for us. After all, we can always call upon Ikabai-Sital to put things right.

Anyway, must dash. I’ve just thought of yet another novel use for the plunger and mop.