USPTO’s Patent Center says: “There was an error”

I was paying an Issue Fee in Patent Center, I clicked “submit”, and at right you can see what happened next.  “There was an error”.

That’s it. The developers of Patent Center want me to know that “There was an error.”

Well, now I know. There was an error.

What really deserves comment here is the state of mind of the developers when they designed this error message. Somebody somewhere at the USPTO, when they were coding this line of code, said “well, I guess I need to choose the text of this error message.”  And this person decided that the way to explain what had gone wrong was to use these four words.

You could ask a twelve-year-old child “is this an acceptable error message?” and the child would say “no it is not”. 

I suppose other questions might also go through one’s mind upon seeing this error message after having tried to pay an Issue Fee.  For example one might wonder “should I pay the Issue Fee a second time?”  One might wonder “if I fail to pay the Issue Fee a second time, will the USPTO eventually deem this application to have gone abandoned?” Of course what one does next is to click around in the various places in Patent Center that ought to provide clear answers to such questions.

For example, one can click around to “Workbench” and “View receipt history”, and depending on where one clicks next in the receipt history, one can reach either of the two screens shown at right.  It will be appreciated that the two screens quoted at right give opposite answers to the question of whether or not the USPTO has received the Issue Fee.  The first screen suggests that maybe the USPTO did receive the Issue Fee, except for the pesky problem that the hourglass never finishes and the “print” icon does not work and the “save” icon does not work.

By contrast, the second screen shows a warning icon and a big yellow banner that says:

Note: Web-based Issue Fee transmittal is not completed until payment is received.

Oh, and I suppose one might be tempted to phone up the Electronic Business Center.  But at this hour of the day, the EBC is closed.  One might be tempted to phone up the Application Assistance Unit, but at this hour of the day, the AAU is closed.

But one circles back to the first screen shot quoted above — the one where the USPTO developer selected the words to use in the red banner error message:

There was an error.

A twelve-year-old, in his or her first-ever software coding class, would have picked better words for this error message than the USPTO developer picked.

I will mention that after about an hour, it got to the point where Patent Center did grudgingly offer up an actual Acknowledgment Receipt, saying that the USPTO had received the Issue Fee.