Kaeley Triller Harms of the Honest to Goodness blog wrote a short essay today about how computers (ok their programmers) can unintentionally miscommunicate. We’re all familiar with how active bluetooth and wifi can send messages to our phones and tablets that indicate a printer or new network device has been detected. Her family was driving home somewhere when a message flashed on her car’s dashboard saying “Fire detected“. This message understandably freaked out her teenage daughter who thought they were in immediate danger. When she turned off the car’s radio to calm her daughter, the warning disappeared. It wasn’t until the next day that she realized it was merely signaling that the radio had detected her Amazon Fire tablet plugged into the car’s external device port.
That both made me laugh and made me think about other seemingly meaningless or just plain odd error messages I’d seen in 40 years of working in software. Some of the following will only make sense to another programmer, but others are just head-shakers.
The Zen variety:
Failed due to errors.
File exists or does not.
The “I knew that” variety:
Warning: File A exists! (upon the attempt to delete file A)
Warning: class xxx::func_xxy hides virtual class yyy::function_xxy (That is the idea, isn’t it?)
The printer is not currently printing. (upon attempting to use a non-existent printer)
The California Cool variety:
Invalid entry is OK.
The overzealous variety:
Warning: quality is defined but not used.
Warning: conversion may lose significant digits (when converting from an int to a long)
Warning: license for Core expires in –9673 days!
The sarcastic variety:
Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords (Microsoft bug Q276304)
The very polite variety:
Pip has caused an error. Pip will now close. (from Picture It Publishing or Pip)
Get a fork:
Unable to reach SAUSAGE (sausage is, of course, a computer’s name)
That last one brings up something that those who don’t work in computers might not realize. System administrators have the most fun because they get to name the computers. One I worked with where we had dozens of computers named them all after moons in the solar system (Phobos, Deimos, Luna, Io, Titan, etc). At another job where we had 7 networked computers, our tech lead was named Suzie White. She signed all her emails S. White, so of course our computer room consisted of S. White and the seven dwarfs (Bashful, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, and Doc).
Musings of a Restless Mind 