However, the designers of Erlang realised that in spite of their undesirable effects, software crashes are much like death and taxes - quite unavoidable. Therefore, rather than treating a crash as a crisis situation that temporarily suspends all normal work until a solution is found, they reasoned it would make far greater sense to treat a crash in exactly the same manner as any other normal runtime event. Consequently, when an Erlang process crashes, this situation is reported as just another type of message arriving in a process' mail box.