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1. James
   January 21st, 2008 at 4:16 am

   You definitely have to be zen to use Windows …

2. violet/riga
   January 21st, 2008 at 9:30 am

   The most disturbing error message I’ve seen was in the language Smalltalk. It popped up and told me “This program accepts no arguments”.

3. Josh
   January 21st, 2008 at 12:56 pm

   My friend got an error message one time

   “Fatal Error:
   Could not find 4″

   a few minutes later another message box popped up.
   “4″

4. Vako
   January 21st, 2008 at 1:44 pm

   Once I got an error message that said “Sorry we’re hosed now”.

5. Rocco
   January 21st, 2008 at 2:11 pm

   I got a freaky error on my Mac. Running After Effects 6.5 on Leopard caused some strange stuff to happen. After a successful render batch, a dialog box popped up and featured upside down text and a lovely striped pattern.

   http://realartusa.com/blog/?p=462

   Kinda weird, but it made me laugh.

6. Jamie
   January 21st, 2008 at 7:08 pm

   My favorite Windows Koan comes from the system event log…

   “The data is the error.”

   Indeed.

7. Epicanis
   January 21st, 2008 at 7:40 pm

   My personal favorite is a little less obvious.

   The old MSDOS “ren” (rename) command would give this “duplicate file name or file not found” error, which sounds perfectly harmless until you parse it.

   “Duplicate file name” = “Filename Already Exists”
   “File Not Found” = “Filename Doesn’t Exist”

   So in short, the error says “The filename exists or it doesn’t.”

8. felix
   January 22nd, 2008 at 12:11 am

   before i came to mac I worked with a windows system, my favorite error of all time was:

   Windows does not exist

   short and simple, i took the day off to contemplate the knowledge the machine god had given me that day

9. Ryan
   January 22nd, 2008 at 3:24 am

   It should be noted that this error message is not generated by a Windows system program, but by the AVG antivirus program. Very unclear error message though.

   Also, the apparent tautology, “the filename exists or it doesn’t” is false (though I am sure you are aware of that). The syntax of a rename command is usually rename filename1 filename2. When the error message says, “duplicate file name or file not found,” it means that filename2 already exists or filename1 does not exist.

10. Doug
    January 22nd, 2008 at 7:41 am

    Not a Windows error. An AVG error. Mac users are obviously so unsophisticated that they can’t tell the difference.

11. Jeannette
    January 22nd, 2008 at 11:36 am

    I’m a Mac girl at home, but at work I’m forced to use a Windows box. I have a plugin on my Outlook which would regularly give me an error. What did it say? _Nothing._ A blank box would pop up with the signature something’s-gone-wrong “bonk,” with a blank button I could click to get out of it.

    Windows presents Choose Your Own Error! How exciting!

12. Larry Sheldon
    January 22nd, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    My favorite is from the dark ages–if anybody needs help with the terms, let me know.

    The Fieldata COBOL compiler for UNIVAC Exec 8 had a diagnostic that read:

    Statement is vacuous.

13. Christopher Gillen
    February 9th, 2008 at 9:43 pm

    If you look up toll number information in the Southern New England Telephone database using their proprietary application TnMgr and then hit the STORE button without having altered any data fields, you get the Zen error message, “Store is not meaningful without change.”

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