Did any of the apps you worked on had a "famous error message" among the user base?

Question

I remember one of the first applications I worked with, at the beginning of my career was built using Clipper (for those who have not been on the area for long, here's a pointer to the Clipper language, pretty cutting-edge at the time :) ).

Clipper used the same database architecture as dBase did, and databases were stored on regular files on the file system, and for each index you would need an accompanying file, those were the .DBF (database file) and the .NTX (the index file).

Every once in a while the database file and the index lost sync. That could happen for a couple of reasons, one of them being forgetting to open one of all the indexes for a given table (represented by a single file).

When that situation happened, the user was presented with a red screen with yellow text saying: "Corruption Detected". Imagine the user of a financial software presented with the corruption detected message, with a red background :-) Some calls we got at the time were pretty fun.

For another product I worked on, a SMS game that resembles a Tamagochi, where the user interacts with others by taking actions, like dating, going to the gym, going to the club and so on... I remember that when we had an exception in Java (the backend), we just replied with a generic message: "Ok, you got it! What do you want to do now?". For the user, it seemed the game understood his last action, but we obviously had some processing problems.

So, on the mobile operators, most of the users who did UAT for the product would call us and say: "When I attempt to chat with someone else, I am getting that 'Ok, you got it' message" :-)

Now it's your turn: do you remember any known error message among the applications you worked on?

Answer 1

Microsoft Navison

Here is the message in its entirety:

"An error occurred"

Well, thanks a bunch for that tidbit of info. How about a line number, error code, something, for the sake of all that is holy.

Answer 2

There is a class of applications that I maintain for my office which are dependent on several other applications and as such have a very high threshold for change (they have been totally rewritten several times since I have been there). These apps are used by only about ten people all of whom know me personally and none of whom are overly technical. Within those apps I have a class of exception that really should never happen and can only happen in if something was misconfigured on the backend (usually in the configuration database that I also manage). I got so tired of trying to come up with descriptive error messages that I knew would not be understood that I started just logging the details and popping up an error box that says: "Error: Ask the friendly programmer." About once per major revision somebody gets that error and we have had enough major revisions that almost everyone has seen it now. The flip-side of this has been that now nobody reads any of the error messages, they just come up to me with a print screen that says "ask the friendly programmer" (or whatever) and a silly look on their face.

Answer 3

"Protocol screwup".

This informative message was generated by Berkley rcp (remote copy, predecessor to scp), which the company I worked for in the late '80s ported to System V Unix. It would occur intermittently. Too much fun. It turns out it was caused by the user having a .profile that generated output (or maybe it was something like .cshrc, I forget). In any event, the output got injected into the file copy byte stream, and "Protocol screwup" was the result.

Answer 4

Not a traditional app, but...

In LaTeX:

underfull \hbox (badness 10000)

was fairly common. This is what happens when you write text to go in a table cell that's wider than the cell itself (necessitating a line wrap).

badness 10000 just sounds a bit ominous to me :-)

Answer 5

I never worked on CVS, but a CVS server will return the error message

I HATE YOU

if authentication fails (it's part of the protocol). With some CVS clients this error message bubbles up to the user, where it's of little help unless you know what's going on ahead of time.

Answer 6

The Kerberos authentication system used to print the error message

Decrypt integrity check failed

This was Kerberos's rather obscure way of saying "Password incorrect". While this message makes sense from the perspective of someone familiar with the protocol, it confused nearly every user who experienced it.

Answer 7

During my undergrad Operating Systems course, we were assigned to implement some filesystem system calls for NACHOS (the OS).

When the user program reached the limit for open file handles, the error message we wrote to the log read "Too many open files, bitch!"

Answer 8

On the Rational 1000 text editor, they supported some of the EMACS keystrokes, including CTRL-K to “kill” the rest of the line (i.e. cut the rest of the line and store it in the clipboard/region buffer) and CTRL-Y to “yank” back the buffer (i.e. like paste).

Occasionally a user who was, unfamilar with the Emacs conventions, would accidentally hit Ctrl-Y.

The status bar would pop up an informative message “Nothing to yank!”

So you would occasionally hear chortles of laughter around the office from a surprised user who was more familiar with the more earthier definitions of “yank” than the EMACS one.