No, sir, we’re afraid it is YOUR fault if our system doesn’t work

No sense of humour, some people.

I’d just booked myself in to a hotel. It was one of those that is run entirely by one person at the reception desk. His many duties include serving drinks and snacks, giving the reception area a once-over with a vacuum cleaner each morning, taking the bins out at night, and explaining to guests 100 times a day how to get to the airport.

The one thing he is not required to do is be a receptionist. So when you walk up to the desk to announce you have a booking, he directs you to a self-service machine in the corner. You simply type in your name and passport number, scan in your swimming certificate for three lengths, provide a sample of your great-grandparents’ DNA and it spits out a key card for your room.

Of course, the key card didn’t work when I got to the door of my room. In my experience, they usually don’t. So I hauled my baggage back down the lift to ask the receptionist what to do.

“Ah, let’s see what has happened,” he said, avoiding my gaze and pretending to concentrate on a dead pixel on his display screen. I recognise this body language. It’s particular to long-suffering customer-facing staff and means “I can see exactly what has happened: you must have done something wrong”.

He slotted the card into a little device on his desk, tapped a couple of keys and returned my card to me. “Now it will work,” he announced, looking into my eyes with one of those smiles that means “There you go, hammerhead”.

Perhaps he could have done this in the first place instead of wasting a short passage of both our lives with that self-service shitheap in the corner. Oh well. As long as we’re agreed that it was my fault, eh?

In my room, the TV set was already switched on, displaying a welcome message announcing “The WiFi is free. Connect to [PLACEHOLDER].”

Oh go on, I thought, I’m game.

Back down in reception, I showed him a photo I’d taken of the message on my TV screen and explained that I couldn’t find [PLACEHOLDER] in the list of SSIDs anywhere in the hotel. Could he help me connect to [PLACEHOLDER] please?

He furrowed his brow and replied that there must be something wrong with my phone.

As I said, some people have no sense of humour.

To be fair, typing the hotel’s actual WiFi SSID into the message template possibly wasn’t in the receptionist’s list of things-to-do that day. But that’s all par for the course in everyday computing, and it has always been so. Just like the self-service machine, nobody wants to take responsibility. Just fob it off onto someone else or blame the user.

Indeed, it fascinates me how desktop operating systems designed to be used by ordinary people often flash up error messages that invite them to consult their “system manager”.

My Mum once phoned me up late at night about this after she had accidentally clicked on a web link (I never knew her to visit a web page deliberately: it would always be accidental). “It says here I should contact my ‘system manager’,” she explained. “Is that you?”

Back home after my hotel adventures, a somewhat explosive return of current following a power-cut had fried my cheap-n-nasty inkjet printer. So I bought a brand new cheap-n-nasty inkjet printer to replace it. But this one refused to work until I had completed an online installation routine for its Instant Ink subscription. And it wasn’t playing ball.

I filled out all my details, the device serial number and so on, pressed ‘Next’ and was presented with this…

After several attempts I considered leaving it until the morning. But the message did say it would be back soon so I persisted into the early hours. No luck. With regret, I contacted HP Support to ask when the website would be back up.

To their credit, HP Support were back to me like a shot. They asked me for the product name, its precise model number, the platforms and OSes I am using, and so on. I provided the information requested, plus the screenshot above, adding a friendly note at the end to point out that it’s their Instant Ink registration website that is down, not my computer.

But no, they asked for more information: serial number, address, phone number and so on. I wasn’t sure how this would help them switch their own website back on, but there you go. So I sent it all to them, plus a few additional details that I thought would be equally useful in solving the problem – such as my inside leg measurement, my star sign, my three favourite desserts, the title of a movie that made me cry, an itemised list of the contents of the wastebin in my bathroom and the number of hairs in my arse crack.

Around lunchtime the following day, the website was back up and I was able to complete the installation. In the afternoon, a message from support confirmed what I knew all along: that they could find no problem.

That is, it was my fault that I can’t access their website, even though it tells me, clearly and explicitly using unambiguous words, that it is literally offline for maintenance. Doh, I’m such a hammerhead. What am I like, eh?

Today I was walking down a shopping street in town and passed an estate agent with this in its window:

I considered popping in to advise them that their rolling screenshow of current properties had stopped working. But then I realised they might ask me for my name, phone number, last three permanent addresses, last five tax returns, the current value of my Bitcoin wallet, my blood group and what operating system I was using to look through their shop window.

So I just walked on. Besides, this hammerhead had left his swimming certificates at home.