airbnb error page

 

Here's an error from airbnb.

Note the cheesy denial that anything has failed.  "Let's try that again".  Oh, everything sounds fine.  I mean, I don't have a house booked, and I'm one hour of hard admin into trying to have a house booked, but nothing's really gone wrong, it's just let's try that again.

Followed by "There is something wrong with your Host's calendar".  At this point they are not my Host, and it looks like they're not going to be my Host.  They are someone who listed something on your web site, and the booking failed, so "your Host" is rather a stretch.  But this putative Host, it is their fault.  There is something wrong with their calendar.  Whatever is wrong with "Host"'s calendar, sounds like it was impossible to detect before I went through the payment process.  At the point where I don't know if payment's been taken from my card or not, there is now "something wrong with your Host's calendar".

And "Please contact your host".  This being the web, a hypermedia platform, and us being well over quarter of a century into commonly using the web, "Please contact a host" is a "hyperlink", to a form, to contact the host.  Oh no it's not, it's just some writing, and the reader of the writing has to work out how to do the thing it says, "contact your host".  I guess once these old companies die, and companies born in the era of the web predominate, then we will have basic hypertext use.  What, airbnb is already that?  So we will never have effective hypertext use.  We are so retarded, on a species-wide level, that the very best in a particular field, delivering services over the web, are incapable of the most basic behaviours in that field, like turning "contact your host" into a link to contact your host.  This is it.  We had a go at it, and failed.  The web was only ever pretend, but we were going to fake it till we made it, but we never did make it.  None of it works, and everyone is too stupid to do the basics.

Apart from that it's a pretty good error page.