A company I worked for some 20 years ago had writers who mostly thought about the "happy path"

… A company I worked for some 20 years ago had writers who mostly thought about the "happy path". When things went wrong, the error messages were left up to the programmers. I discovered this when I tried to install our product on an old Mac and got this message: Your hard disk is too small Wait? My what is too small? Later, on Windows, I got this popup: You are not here WTF? I searched for this message and found it came from a function called CantHappen(), which was kind of like an assert(false). Something you throw into a code path just to note a place that you really know the code can never reach. Until it inevitably does. I went on a rampage through our code, finding all these crazy messages and updating them - and when possible, fixing the code so the error messages wouldn't be needed. My manager and his manager, to their credit, knew how bad our messages were, and they helped me pull together a little team with a writer and translators to fix these up. And we did. Our messages got a lot better, easier to understand and more helpful. …