One of our line-of-business applications sometimes gets very heavily loaded, and several times a day, when you try to issue a query or update a record, you’ll get the error message, “Unable to contact middle tier. (other technical gibberish goes here)”. Whenever this happens, I like to amuse myself by shouting “Stupid middle tier! We should just get rid of it. It’s always unresponsive.” Of course, this is a joke along the lines of changing that 15 to a 1. The system follows the standard three-tier model. Getting rid of the middle tier won’t actually fix anything.

But if the error message keeps blaming the middle tier, then to a naive user (or in this case, a willfully stupid one), getting rid of the problematic component might not sound like that bad an idea.