An ambiguous error message

While using an online software package, I received this ambiguous error message:

“There was an error validating your registration key. Our registration server may be temporarily down for maintenance.”

Analysis

The wording allows four possibilities:

One. The registration server is not down. (That is to say, something else is wrong.)

Two. The registration server is down, temporarily, for maintenance.

Three. The registration server is down, temporarily, for some reason other than maintenance.

Four. The registration server is down, permanently, for some reason other than maintenance.

Does this software provider mean to say that it does not know what its systems are doing at any given moment? If so, whatever happened to that real-time visibility* that we keep hearing about?

The Takeaway: Every time you send careless writing to your customers, you reduce your company’s credibility. Consciously or unconsciously, your customers wonder, “Are the employees who build the product as careless as the employee who wrote this?” and “Haven’t the managers noticed how careless this employee is?” and “Or maybe they have noticed, but they don’t care.” And so on. And the customers tell many other people about your company’s carelessness.

See disclaimer.

*Google the phrase “real-time visibility” and you’ll get three million hits.