I’ve been doing some work with a German piece of content management software, interesting getting to know the product, its limitations and strengths and also the subtle language differences. The above image is their “standard” error message, what they actually want you to do is save any open sections then save this section. The “Ok fine!” was amusing for a while, now less so. Note to self: make error messages brief and to the point without extraneous words. My favorite of all time is the one which simply says

I guess that takes account of all the expected errors. Seriously, when did we ever have expected errors?

Then again here’s another of my personal favourites, I think the text speaks for itself.

But not to be outdone by this wonder, do you know how long that is? It’s 2,386,093 minutes remaining which is 39,768.21666666667 hours or 1,657.009027777778 days or 4.539750761035008 years. That’s one loooong copy completion time.

And to close here’s a final one from my archives (yes, I’ve collected these and others too) and this one seems pretty reasonable until you see the word “might”. You might or might not lose information, it’s kind of up in the air, exactness was never a forte of compute systems. To the uninitiated the data that might or might not be lost looks inherently meaningful too, doesn’t it?