code_martial's Journal: What an error!

In the endless list of things that Microsoft is bitched about is their error messages. What I'm writing about is perhaps the most ridiculous error message I've ever seen.

Last Wednesday, I was working (nay, committing a sin, as one of my friends says) on Visual Studio .Net. In the middle of editing an ASP.Net DataGrid, I got an error message that left me aghast. The first thing I did was hit Print Screen. Take a look at this screenshot (800x600, 40kB) to see what was so... whatever, about it.

After seeing the dialog I was expecting some really nasty thing to happen, though I didn't think much about the possible outcomes. I just hit OK to see what was to come. The page I was editing was still there. I continued from the point of interruption till I reached the stage of rebuilding the solution. The build went fine too. In short, nothing happened. Nothing!

The next morning I told my flatmate about it. Here's how it went:

Me: Hey, this really funny thing happened yesterday... blah blah... and I took a screen dump!

Mate: You saw that error message all you could think of was taking a screenshot?

Me: Well, one's gotta keep his sense of humour in a crisis situation :D

Mate: Hah! When you face a real crisis, all the humour goes flying out of the window. Didn't you think of switching to another window and backing up your files before dismissing the dialog?

Me: (with an oops!-ish expression) Umm, no.

Mate: See? It's better to keep a level head in a crisis situation.

Some other wonderful error messages I've come across from assorted Microsoft software (recollected from human memory, not verbatim):

Unknown could not be found -- Windows Explorer

A fatal error has occured. Save all your files and restart Visual Studio .Net

Service could not be started due to some errors. The following action will be taken in (0) miliseconds: no action taken -- Windows 2000 EventViewer