259 words
Computers in general and the web in particular are rather rude. Being told obscure things like press F1 to continue
is polite when compared with people telling you your screen is too small, you browser is too old, your preferences are wrong... Whenever people are too incompetent or too lazy to do something right they'll throw a bunch of technobabble at you and suggest it's your fault. That's ridiculous. Your only fault may have been to visit those people's web site in the first place. Obviously they didn't want to deal with you though.
I just discovered that among the many things that amazon get right is also politeness. When doing something with my shopping basket on their site an error occured. The message they displayed was actually along the lines of: There's a problem with our system. We apologise. Please try again later, we're looking into it.
Knowing the non-immediacy of the web, this is probably as good as it can get technically but it's also good and adequate communication. First, they take the blame, saying it's in their system. None of that ERROR!
crap there that makes the user think they made a mistake of some kind. Second, they apologise for the inconvenience. Third, they tell you what to do next and reassure you it will work (which it did a second later in my case). Fourth, what they ask you to do is easy and sort-of reasonable to do – a detail that many companies who should actually be begging for your business tend to forget.