In reality, my character did not decide that. My character was actively in the middle of trying to do something with that thing when an automated system decided for me / my character that they wanted to throw it away.
I raised it on xhelp and Cerberus explained to me (paraphrasing). "/That/ message means /this/." That was helpful and I appreciated the clear explanation of why things happened the way that they did.
I suggested to Cerberus that the message should be re-coded to reflect something more IC and less meta. He basically told me to go suck eggs.
I have two suggestions.
One, /consider/ adding some signs or other indicators that there is a timer in play. As a player / character, I would not have gone @ooc to deal with RL when I did, if I knew that there was a timer in place. It was something that I could have spent 5 minutes finishing up, but didn't because I try not to blow off RL to play games (and more often than not, fail :) But that's a problem nobody here can fix for me.).
Two, /strongly consider/ changing the fail message to reflect something that is not forcing an action on a character that presupposes their intent.
