Blame the user

The folks at Time Inc. (a multi-billion-dollar piece of multi-zillion-dollar TimeWarner) boast of "Trusted editing, the best brands in the business," but apparently no one in their image department is talking with their Web server people. I popped on a link to one of their magazines and got the following error message:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@timeinc.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

(Emphasis added, but the huge title font is theirs, not mine. -A)

How's that for a nice friendly customer-facing error message? ("Tell us what happened, and how it's your fault.") Yes, I realize that's probably a default error message on the server, but it's hardly the kind of thing a giant consumer-marketing company should show its customers in this Internet-savvy age. I'm sure Ted Turner would never have tolerated this if he were still alive. (And yes, I know he's still out there writing checks. But the original Ted Turner has been gone for at least 20 years now.)

So here's hoping that somewhere, somehow, some server admin at TimeInc.net gets a bit of time allocated to go script some friendlier messages on their servers. I no longer have a parakeet, so I no longer have any use for Time magazine, but apparently I still have to read their server errors once in a while.