Verizon's I'm A Teapot Error And Other Technology Fails

This is not my week for using technology. None of these problems was my fault, other than my existing in the universe and the attraction that brought.

Today, I wanted to review my Verizon mobile account, and I noticed that the website had changed since my last visit. I clicked on the sign-in link, which strangely brought up a menu of things, none of which said "sign-in" but were clearly a set of destinations—which is a terrible UI. Clicking on any of them led me to the dumbest error ever.

{"error":{"status-code":"418","message":"We're sorry. We are unable to process your request at this time. For more information about Verizon products and services, visit [verizon.com](http://verizon.com/). If you continue to experience problems please contact us [VZ.GTS.ASPD@verizon.com](mailto:VZ.GTS.ASPD@verizon.com) with Incident ID  418-DGfJTsdv, date, time, IP and requested URL.","request-id":"3d99cd2de3bd5dc23fa1199432546bec"}}

It also set the HTTP error for this JSON content to 418—I'm A Teapot.

That error is a joke; it was never meant to be used for anything. Not only was the error 418, but the error page displayed only the JSON content instead of an error page. A few minutes ago, I was able to access the sign-in page itself, but it still fails, this time with access control errors (Safari is experiencing a CORS issue), which then results in the 418 error again.

This was only the latest problem. I am building a new PHP version of my art website, converting it from statically-generated so that I can add more dynamic filtering options. Yes, using PHP is terrible, but it's a simple website, and PHP is easier than doing something more complicated.

While testing my new website on a test server, I noticed that images were loading slowly, and sometimes they would partially load, only to have the connection dropped by the server. I used KeyCDN to front a DigitalOcean Space, which has been working fine for four years. All the images are loaded using a subdomain (CNAME). So what gives? It also happened on my production website and on multiple networks, both via Wi-Fi and cell. I opened a ticket to KeyCDN since the images are loading from them, but all I got in response was "nothing changed on our end, try purging the cache", which of course did nothing. I decided to create a new subdomain and point it directly at DigitalOcean's CDN, which resolved the issue. I then closed my KeyCDN account.

I used PhpStorm, a development tool from JetBrains. Somehow, the project became confused; it had two root folders, and deleting the empty one resulted in it reappearing. I also couldn't rename the project. After some back and forth with support, including creating a video, I decided to abandon the project and recreate it from a copy, and that worked.

Earlier in the week, when I was ready to test my new app, I went to the DigitalOcean website to log in, apparently for the first time since I had installed Tahoe and the latest version of Safari. I logged in and got nothing, a white page.

So I got out the inspector and tracked it down to them loading Amplitude, an analytics package. Safari blocks trackers by default, including Amplitude. The problem was that whoever coded this assumed the tracker would always load; the page fails if the tracker is not loaded due to some exception. So I opened a ticket with them to report the problem

Then the fun began. The first couple of messages indicated that they would ask engineering to look into it, so I assumed they would handle it. Instead, I received several messages instructing me on what I needed to do in my own code to load the framework. I kept saying it's not my problem, it's yours. Each subsequent message repeated the exact instructions as the previous one, but using different words. Were they AI? Eventually, I resorted to lots of bold messaging, and someone finally realized I was reporting their bug, not asking for help. So hopefully they are working on it.

I discovered that Safari in Tahoe does not appear to allow you to disable content blockers for a specific website, which is what triggered the Amplitude issue. So I switched to Safari Technology Preview, which fixes that issue. Still, one shouldn't require a tracker to load, as they are commonly blocked, or at least deal with it in a reasonable fashion.

During my 40-year career, I consistently worked very hard to ensure that what I or my team delivered was always correct. Having things fail in strange ways is less enjoyable when you know how they should work, but can't fix anything.

With so much AI vibe coding, if strange errors are the future, although I have seen people mess things up often enough, it can now be done with more automation!

Lastly, today I had to return to the eye care place to check on my new glasses, as reading on a computer was more difficult. It turns out the lab ground the progressive lenses incorrectly, so they will have to redo it.

Sigh.