Back in the day of time cards, that was more or less how it worked (minus the commute part) the machine was either at the front door or in the break room, and you’d punch in, then go to your station, set up and start. End of day, you’d pack up, then punch out on your way out the door.

Your average Microsoft error “error 37253” is worthless to me

This is a security thing. A descriptive error message is useful for troubleshooting, but an error message that is useful enough can also give away information about architecture (especially if the application uses remote resources). Instead, provide an error code and have the user contact support to look up what the error means, and support can walk the user through troubleshooting without revealing architecture info.

Another reason can be i18n/l10n: Instead of keeping translations for thousands of error messages, you just need to translate “An Error Has Occurred: {errnum}”