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by deadly ernest

The help desk was accessed via an internal website, if your system was down you had a colleague log the fault for you. There was some industrial problems between the help desk staff and management. One day I logged on to report a colleague's system was not allowing her to log in again. The help desk did not have its usual message but a notice stating.

"Please do not waste your time contacting the help desk, we're all fed up and have quit. No faults will be actioned until after those fools in management can hire some replacements.

PS The authentication server has gone down so if you can't get logged in that is the reason. Likely repair time is (the infinity symbol)"

Checking with staff we found out that the server went down just before management threatened to sack any staff who continued with industrial action - so they all quit at once, one spent their last few minutes putting the notice on their web site so the other staff would not get too upset.

We all had a good laugh, as we were required to log off each time we left our work area, and no authentication server meant we could not get back in and do any work. That afternoon most of us had a 30 minute divisional meeting after lunch. The division head sent us home after the meeting as we couldn't do any work without the computers.

by jaqui

the funny error messages built into the linux kernel, the one that tickles my funny bone the most:

"Help!! LPT1 is on Fire!!!!!"

by Member 25348569

This was the message that you could sometimes get installing NetWare 3.12 on clone kit with uncertified drivers. It was almost invariably a server crash.

I've actually had it happen to me and it's an easy fix (update your drivers!) but very puzzling if you don't have access to Novell's troubleshooting docs.

Novell had a number of Memorial abends in honour of people who'd left the company and they were replaced by the correct production ID and message but this is one that slipped the net.

by j.lupo

enough to have seen any of these. Though at one company where I worked our internal help desk used to have fun with the messages on the site.

At a company I worked at early in my career, I used to have little graphics happen when people logged in. We had a starship enterprise come flying across the screen with comments from Kirk, Spock and McCoy as they blew up the Database. That was our system down message. :)

For the holidays we would have a train that went around the office from PC to PC as people would log in, each PC screen became another car on the train and it would keep cycling with a Santa, a Hannukka Manorah, Reindeer, and other holdiay symbols on it all saying System rebooting, please wait - Happy Holidays - System rebooting, please wait - Happy Holidays - System died, you can go home now.

by pkrdk

I once did that, and became wiser. The system in question had the feature that for each user or group you could run a specific program as the very first thing after logging on. Happened before anything else.
I wrote a program presenting a screen exactly like the log-on screen. Effect was that people logged-in and got the login display again. Thinking they just mistyped, the entered user-id and password again, and in return received a login display with a funny message, in the end telling users that if they kept on playing with the IT system everything would be erased.
One girl in the office just had a series af 'one of these days', she was very careful in her work, and didn't make mistakes. This joke was just too much, she burst into crying and went home for 2 days.

Jokes, pranks, practical jokes are OK, but be careful who you use it on.

Another lesson learnt: Never be abusive when writing error messages. When we are in trouble we don't want to be blamed for it too. If I make a mistake in traffic, last thing I need is the missus to start raving. We have an agreement on that: If any of us start critizising the driving, we swap seats.

by nicknielsen

These are great! I haven't laughed like this in a long time.

But I still prefer the simple irony of our ancestral programmers:

Keyboard not found.
Press a key to continue IPL...

by peter.hanney

Saw this years ago and just found it with a spot of Googling.....

Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I websurfed, weak and weary,
Over many a strange and spurious website of hot chicks galore,
While I clicked my fav?rite bookmark,
suddenly there came a warning,
And my heart was filled with mourning,
mourning for my dear amour.
?Tis not possible, I muttered,
give me back my cheap hardcore! ?
Quoth the server, ?404″.

by ciderick

...

Keyboard error - press F1 to continue.

Love it - makes me laugh every time i see it.

by desmodeus

My personal favourite. If you've ever booted an x86 without plugging in a keyboard (or if you plugged the keyboard and mouse in each other's ports) you'll have seen this: "Keyboard error. Press F1 to continue". So let me get this straight, the keyboard isn't working and you're telling me pressing F1 will fix it???

by rclark2

Back in the late 70's I got a call about 2:30 a.m. one morning from Kadina AFB in the Phillipines. They had the subject error message with a phone number (mine), and wanted to know what was going on. This was in a 27K line cobol program so I told them I would get back to them as soon as possible.

After several levels of the recall tree were activated, and lots of old listings were checked, we found it. A nested else with that message.

Unfortunately, both the supervisor and the newby were both long gone, otherwise, two carreers would have ended that night. By the way, the supervisor was almost right. The code was dated 13 years previous to the event.

by deadly ernest

Sveral years ago I used to work for an Australian branch of a USA based international computer support organisation. One of my duties was as 'On call' troubleshooter for things wrong with the high security gateway. Six years later I still get the occassional phone call from the help desk asking me to respond to a call out on a weekend or late at night. Seems they have trouble updating their call out lists. But 13 years, well it's obviously not a common problem.

by rclark2

I supported 107 AFBs world wide then. Just voices on the phone. But you are correct. Clark is in the PI and Kadena was on Okinawa.

We had to do a bianary patch on punch cards, then shoot it out to them over commsat. That was when computers took up a lot of floor space and tape drives were the size of refrigerators.

by nicknielsen

My first computer programs were punched for IBM BASIC to run on an IBM 360/10. That summer we upgraded to a Burroughs 3500/II, with a massive 512k in core. What a monster! Twice as fast as the 360. :)

But we still had the old 002 keypunch machines :p

by rclark2

I programmed with circuit packs. Didn't really know what I was doing, but if you inserted a wire in tab A and ran it to tab b11, it would sort on last name, etc. That lasted about three years and I moved up to a Honeywell 6000 and a Burroughs 3500 and North Star PC's. The North Star had dual 5 megabyte hard drives and ran on the MCP OS. The whole OS was 64K. We stripped it down to 58K to allow us to run our programs in the remaining 6K of memory. Whoooeee, we were in heaven then. That lasted about a year and we changed over to Honeywell 6060's and Burroughs 4700's with ORJETS. Then moved up to a System 34, 36, 38, and finally AS400's.

I wouldn't want to go back there, but there wasn't a lot of difference then in hardware and software.

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