It used to be, “Have you tried rebooting it?”
That was always a cop-out. After rebooting, it would work. The implication was that the problem was your fault.
It wasn’t. It was buggy software.
These days “have you tried rebooting it?” has been replaced by, “Have you tried deleting cookies and clearing your browser’s cache?”.
You do that. It works. Again, the implication is the problem was at your end.
Again, it wasn’t.
This isn’t about how websites work, but the short and mostly accurate version is that it is the website, not you, that controls both cookies and caching.
It is much easier to have a percentage of website users clear cookies and cache – and mostly be happy to do so – than it is to fix the underlying problem.
But I never have cookie or cache problems with Google. Or Amazon. Or quite a few other sites.
Why not?
Because they take the time and effort to do it properly. I suspect, quite apart from any corporate policy, somebody has pride in their work.
Pride doesn’t make it impossible for mistakes to happen, of course. But it usually means that mistakes are admitted, owned and fixed.
We’re proud about how we look after cloud computing and Linux systems for our clients.
And our support staff won’t ask you to fix things that are our responsibility.
Photo by Michael Geiger on Unsplash