A friend of mine recently sent me a screenshot of an error message that Outlook gave him. It was a blank box with only an exclamation point inside. When he clicked OK, Outlook crashed. Unfortunately, he’s never been able to reproduce the error.
We’ve all seen the “illegal operation” and “connection timed out” errors. But what are some of the more unusual ones you’ve seen? Here’s two of my favorites:
Once, on a Linux system running GNOME on top of the Enlightenment windows manager, i did something that caused Enlightenment to crash. GNOME subsequently sent me a message that said something like, “Oh no! Enlightenment has left me! What can I do? I’m going to end it all! So long, cruel world!” and had a picture of this little gnome freaking out. That message alone was enough to make me forget about the work i’d just lost.
While using a homebrew program for the Palm, i got an error message that simply said “MEEP!” with no explanation whatsoever.
Hee hee, the GNOME errors are the best. I remember one in (I believe) Home Essentials or something from Microsoft; it would just say “Something is missing.” Um, helpful. And my personal favorite from my time doing Word support was always “Windows cannot find the printer…”. I can’t tell you how many people on the other end of the phone said “But it’s right HERE!”
“Well, now you did it. You went and broke the Internet.”
“The page you are trying to reach has spontaneously combusted.”
Unfortunately my mom got that last one when she was practicing the HTML on her website and she didn’t realize it was a joke. She got really upset because she thought she lost everything. I had to call up the right page to convince her it was still there.
Years ago in elementary school when we worked on Apple computers, the standard message was “Syntax Error.” One time I somehow managed to get a “Beserk Error.” I never was able to figure out what I did, but it must have been bad.
Well, you have my sympathy Mr. Compiler, but how do you think I feel?
I once edited COMMAND.COM to give strange error messages when the user typed something wrong. I also changed the “dir” command to “sex” and the “del” command to “asdlkajsdf;lkj”, or something like that, which meant that typing an incorrect command was almost unavoidable.
