Lost in Germany

[Former Member]

Hi Guys

This is actually based on a true incident.

A Helicopterepilot had got himself lost recently and in trying to find the airfield in which to land saw a number of people on the ground.

He managed to signal the people on the ground and sent them a message

" Where am I."

Theh answer came back " You are In a Helicopter".

At once the helicopter pilot knew where he was and managed to find the landing field.

When he stepped out of the aircraft he was asked "how did you find out where you were".

The pilot answered --it was very easily actually - -I knew I had to be over the SAP building since the answer I got back from the people on the ground was 100% SAP.

Functionally and technically correct but practically USELESS.

(MY SAP PET HATE is when there is a message and you press F1 all you get is the SAME MESSAGE in a larger screen. It doesn't tell you what you have done wrong or even some suggestions on how to fix the problem.)

Cheers

jimbo

[Former Member]

There is an addendum to this.

On hearing the pilot's explanation, one person on the ground told him "You must be in senior management"

Amazed, the pilot said, "Yes, I am the President in my organization. But how did you know?"

The person replied, "You don't know where you are... you don't know where you want to go... yet you want me to help you. And if I cannot, then it is all my fault!"

Enjoy!!!

Lakshman

[Former Member]

Hi Jimbo,

I can only agree with you on the lack of detail in error messages. In my view this stems from the fact that when you create a new message the 'self explanatory' flag is checked by default, whereas in reality 73 characters is rarely enough to explain anything completely. It's far too easy to create a "something has gone wrong" error message without providing any detail.

Now, where are those <rant> tags....

Regards,

Nick

[Former Member]

Hi Nick,

On the flip side,

If errors messages were so descriptive, why/who would employ us(Read SAP Consultants) to fix those issues..:D..

lol..

Cheers and Regards

Ravi Kanth

[Former Member]

My favourite has to be & & & & , with the self-explanatory box ticked 😛

[KjetilKilhavn]

I'm not sure if this is applicable in the "worst message" competition, but I love it when people just enter the error message text as a string (sometimes passed to your favourite) - in Norwegian of course. We are a big country with more than 4 million people living here, but I would not completely disregard the possibility that someone who does not understand Norwegian eventually will be using the system.

But hey - I am paid by the hour...

[David]

My favorite error message is the one that appears in my car "Check Engine" which can mean anything from "you have just thrown a piston rod" to "the gas station attendant did not screw your gas cap back on tight enough". It is sort of like the old Microsoft "General Protection Fault" message.

DB

[KjetilKilhavn]

The best error message I have seen (not in SAP) is "No such error!" (Yes, including the exclamation mark.) It is just too bad I don't have a screen-shot of it. It appeared in ComputerWorld Norway, where they encouraged everyone to send in their favourite error messages and printed a different one every week if they had one worthy of being printed.

[Former Member]

Years ago, I did some programming in Mark IV (I bet no one has even heard of that one). I recall seeing an error message that went something like:

"An impossible situation has occurred."

They really thought of everything.

Rob

[Former Member]

The one I prefer is in each short dump :

"To resolve the problem, contact your SAP system administrator."

I am the SAP administrator !

[Former Member]

Hi there Rob

I actually have heard of MARK IV.

Was used on an IBM mainframe --remember MVS and TSO and a really HORRIBLE programming language called "COBOL" or as we used to call it

"COBBLERS".

I remember also just when PC's were starting out there was some type of report generator called "THE LAST ONE".

The sales spiel at the time was it would totally do away with programmers as all you had to do was describe your business process and this application would do all the code generation for you.

It would still report errors such as "This process can't possibly exist" or even "Please go back and redesign your application"

I think nearly 35 years later people are STILL trying for applications that could do away with programmers

In spite of really good technology (OO etc) we STILL need GOOD programmers perhaps more than ever -- but programmers who understand the business applications.

It was the same back then

Nothing really has changed other than there are better tools today and possibly more "Cowboys" around.

Another topic - but this is 99% of the problem with "Offshoring". Often people decide to have "ABAP factories" or developers in India / Singapore etc because at first sight it looks a cheap option.

However since the offshore facility doesn't have an inkling about the business processes involved or what to do if application / process errors occur the time taken to repair the defect and get the business process up and running again more than renders the whole offshoring exercise futile as the final costs are FAR larger than originally estimated.

Cheers

jimbo

[ThomasZloch]

reg. short dumps:

I always liked the line "Short dump has not been completely stored. It is too big." in previous R/3 versions.

I tried to imagine what a long dump would look like, but my brain was too small...

[pokrakam]

My all-time favourite message is from the days when Yoda visited SAP (bet you didn't know that!).

Tip: Supports the Binding Editor Drag&Drop from Release 6.20. 
Directly Between the Left and Right Tree 
Or From an Element in the Tree to a Field in the Binding 

Tried It Yet?

[  Yes  ]  [  No  ] [ x Cancel  ] 

Cheers,

Mike

[former_member110461]

There used to be an error message in the transport logs of:

panic! panic! panic!

Don't know if it still happens. It is when the RDD* jobs are not runnign for some reason.

Always a shock to find that one when you haven't seen it before.

[Former Member]

if your Unix kernel crashed, you also get the PANIC message.... followed by a dump... and an immediate shutdown.

[Former Member]

Actually, this is originally the (very) old "Microsoft Helicopter Joke", and, of course, the first sentence there is:

"A helicopter was flying around above Seattle..."