I've always seen this a lot, and it's becoming even more
common. The standard
problem report in all fields of
computing is now "the
computer won't
frobnitz; it gives an
error message".
Isn't that fascinating? It gives an error message! "What error message does it give?"
"I don't know."
You don't know! Presumably when you go to the doctor's you're also incapable of giving any description more coherent than "Something's wrong".
"If you're incapable of giving any explanation of what goes wrong when you try it, how do you expect me to help?"
"I thought maybe you'd already seen it, and know what to do."
"No, sorry, when it does that I always have to read the error message before I have any idea what's wrong."
I'm serious. People are incapable of reading error messages. They won't accept a computer's word that there's a difference between a file not being found and it being found but corrupted. Often I have to "come and see" for myself; when I do that, reading the error message to the questioner will often bring them to enlightenment: "Oh! The file has the wrong format! Thank you!"
And it's everywhere today. At work, programmers will ask my advice on a compiler problem, without being able to say what the error message is. You'd think that when sending an email people would have the sense to cut and paste the error message, but no, that's "too technical" for anybody to be able to grasp. (Yes, I know that most user friendly programs make sure to pop up up error messages in a modal dialog box that allows no cutting and pasting, but it also happens to me with compiler error message).
What's wrong with people???