cryptic light

Ugh. The Check Engine light in my (almost brand new) car came on today.

Is there anything more cryptic and annoying than the Check Engine light? Even if I were to open the hood and check my engine, I would have absolutely no idea what was wrong or how to fix it, and the light doesn't tell me what to check in the engine. You'd think with all the fancy electronics in modern cars today, your car would be able to actually tell you what was wrong with your engine and what you should do about it. (My car will tell me how far I've gone and my average miles per gallon since my last fill up, it will tell me what the temperature is outside and what my average speed is, but when something goes wrong I just get an ugly yellow light on my dashboard that confuses me and stresses me out. No help whatsoever, unless you're a car mechanic and you have one of those fancy computers that plugs into your car's data port).

It's like when your computer crashes and Windows displays some cryptic error message on a blue screen that tells you that your computer has crashed. (You get some weird error codes but unless you're a programmer with a debugging machine, you're completely in the dark). And your machine just keeps on crashing and you have no clue what to do next. Such a great design...makes you wonder, doesn't it?