We mostly order our wine online. We’d recently had a really lovely bottle of white that we decided was worth buying a few more bottles of. So on Friday morning, I logged in to the website, picked some other bottles to balance out our wine cupboard, and then made up the order with bottles of this particular wine. It was marked as “Low stock” so I was keen to get my order made before that became “Out of stock”. I hit the Checkout button and saw this message:

Something about the wording didn’t feel right - “we only have 0 in stock” didn’t feel like an out of stock message, it felt like a message suggesting I change my order and try again. So that’s what I did. I changed my 5 to 4 and tried again. Success!

As a software tester, I see a lot of error and validation messages. This was the first time that I’d used that accrued knowledge to play a hunch in a non-working context. Yesterday my 4 bottles of wine, along with the rest of the case, turned up. My hunch came off!