Sunday, July 09, 2017

Survey: The Worst Error Message


I participated in a recent survey. The question was:

What's the Worse Error Message You've Ever Seen?

This was my contribution, which received thousands of up-votes:

A graduate student brought me an error message that said:

THIS IS AN IMPOSSIBLE ERROR. THIS ERROR CANNOT OCCUR.

IF THIS ERROR OCCURS, SEE YOUR IBM REPRESENTATIVE.

I told the student I wasn’t the right person to see, but he should see his IBM representative.

He said, “But I’m my IBM representative.”

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I'd like to collect some of these lousy error messages for my book, ERRORS.

If you've got a good (i.e. bad) one, please share it with us in a comment to this post.


Thanks for contributing.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

No keyboard or input device connected.
Press F1 to continue

Unknown said...

"One item could not be deleted because it was missing."
Apple Mac System 7 error message

Jim Bullock said...

The worst error message I've ever seen is oddly common to many systems: no message at all.

I think it counts, as I certainly "saw" everything it presented, and every time I understood everything it was telling me (though not what I needed to know.)