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Wonderful way to begin my day: A startup DOS-style message appears; the PC's screen explains that a crucial system file is missing and that I should insert the restore CD-ROM. But in the chamber of horrible housekeeping that is my office, I have no idea where the disc is.

Next step: Denial. I reboot, or try to, and get the same message. That CD has to be around somewhere. It has to. I spend a couple of hours overturning every shred of clutter in the place. Nothing.

A few days later I try again. You know the thinking: Maybe it fixed itself somehow. And then I see something I missed before. Down in the lower-right corner of the computer manufacturer's startup screen, I see the phrase '<F10=System Recovery>'. That's when it hits me: There is no restore disc. This is one of those machines that comes with rollback data on the hard drive alone.

Admittedly, having the restorative option on the hard drive is handy when you can't find the CD. But there's no excuse for not supplying a disc that costs, what, 10 cents? And even worse is the generic message that's not only inappropriate but simply wrong.

This kind of thing happens constantly. Error messages and what I've come to call "monologue boxes" are supposed to help you solve problems. In reality, they're riddled with errors themselves--when you can figure out what they mean. Take my copy of Norton AntiVirus, which is supposed to update itself automatically. I've repeatedly run into situations when the updater tells me that it has aborted--and, afterward, that my virus definitions are up-to-date. Which is correct? Who knows?

TurboTax still offers a classic in the annals of dialog-box stupidity. When you exit, it asks, 'Do you want to save this file?' But what it really means is, 'Do you want to save the changes you made to this file?' If you had simply been fooling around with some what-if scenarios, the right answer might be 'no'. But if you were afraid you'd lose the file itself, you'd probably pick 'yes'--and wipe out some of the original data. How hard is it to get a basic question like this right?

Crummy error messages have migrated from our PCs to the Web. The archetypal example: A site wants data in a certain format--say, phone numbers without parentheses or hyphens--but doesn't say so. You enter information your way, then get a message that says something like 'incorrect data' with no clue as to what's wrong. Bad enough that the site doesn't dope out what you meant; often it will force you to reenter not just the phone number but everything else, too.

If this keeps up, maybe we should just replace all error messages with the ultimate generic one Alan Cooper presented in his book on interface design, About Face. The message? 'It's obvious from your actions that you don't know jack squat about computers or software.' Your options? One button labeled 'I am not worthy', one marked 'Please kill me now', and one declaring, 'I should go back to pencil and paper'.

Click here to see additional columns by Contributing Editor Stephen Manes. He has written about technology for two decades.