I'm reminded of that episode so many times. The HOA in my neighborhood will fine you if your grass gets over a certain height or you leave your trash can out in front of the house for too long (over 2 days after trash pickup). It was my first house and I didn't really know what the HOA did besides making sure everyone had nice looking houses. When the weather is nice, you'll see a couple people wandering the streets with clipboards in hand and stern looks on their faces. When the weather is nasty, you never see them and no one gets fined for anything.

Of course, it is really hard for them to enforce the rules in the houses that have been foreclosed & families moved out.

I used to work at an e-commerce company and we added a feature to indicate to our support team if they were looking at information about someone's account & there was an issue. Initially, the information about potential issues was the same font as the rest of the page but it was in bold.

After a week, the manager said no one was paying attention to the errors. Change it to be a bigger font and bright red. So we did. Things were fine for a week. Then the manager came back "people are ignoring the error." These messages were inside h1 HTML tags, bright red, and CSS styled to be huge. 18 or 24 point font on a page where most everything else was 12 point, if I recall correctly. We had did just about everything except for putting it in a BLINK tag. We do have some standards, you know!

The manager came up with what she thought was a good solution: randomly change the color, position and size of the warning messages. We told her no way, just train your people better. I haven't checked back to see what they ended up doing after I stopped working there.

Shorter story that proves the point: I had a family member complain their email wasn't working any more. I went over & told them hit the button to get new email. An error pops up that they have an invalid password. I told them it means that you have the wrong password, call tech support because there's nothing I can do about it.