Cryptic error messages are frustrating, but there's no need to be nasty. Wrong. If you want to achieve anything then be nasty. Be an asshole. Be the goddamn p

Cryptic error messages are frustrating, but there's no need to be nasty. Wrong. If you want to achieve anything then be nasty. Be an asshole. Be the goddamn pestilence. You want the two little red up-arrows in their ticket tracker, not the blue "deferred" orb icon or the green auto-responder checkmark. You don't want to increment a number in the monthly customer service report sheet. You want the head of customer service walk up personally to his manager and wince something like "Yelp, the users are raising living hell over this issue". There are ofcourse exceptions, some companies have excellent customer support and don't need that kind of treatment. But when dealing with a behemoth like amazon then that's the only way to get anywhere, in my expirience from both sides of the frontline. Remember the poor helpdesk guy can not judge that this is a brown paper bag bug. A failed payment transaction should obviously provide more information than "Error. Period.". But how could he possibly know that? He can't. So what does he do when the inquiries about insufficient error messages begin to pile up? He walks up to his manager, who doesn't have a clue about the technical pecularities either. He can only judge the inbound corpus by volume and intensity. Unless you represent a large customer your volume will always be 1. Hence your only leverage is in the intensity knob.