As the article states, these are not good when the proverbial hits the proverbial. Particularly when your boss is standing over your shoulder and the company i

As the article states, these are not good when the proverbial hits the proverbial. Particularly when your boss is standing over your shoulder and the company is losing money, shirts and hair. However, sometimes we can feign 'scheduled upgrades' for '503 site down'. In ecommerce you can say 'we are re-stocking the store, here is a coupon, take a screen break and see you in five'. But actually you might be redeploying the whole codebase due to some fire. Another problem with error messages is how concisely they are written. Cutesy is not concise. And neither is American English. British English is just a little bit more concise, e.g. 'wastepapaer basket' vs 'bin' or 'dehydrated' vs 'thirsty' or 'parking garage' vs 'car park'. In error messages as well as success messages you often have something like 'your thing has been updated successfully' instead of 'thing updated'. Error messages also need to make sense if indexed by a search engine. It has to be unambiguous and specific to the software, not other software. Even if the docs are not available for the error online, you want the error message to be useful when Googled.