Humorous error messages diminish the irritation a bit: this “You are lost” 404-variant from The Telegraph made me smile. Fail Whale is a similar example. It wasn´t exactly funny, but over time Fail Whale had a similar effect on me, eliciting a “Hello again Fail Whale” response rather than peevishness.  Many of its fans agree.

A serious aside on the content of error messages: Emily Wilska, author of Non-fatal errors: Creating Usable, Effective Error Messages says that they are often an afterthought. This surprises no one, I gather?

Scrambling to get something–anything!–in the product to deal with problems users might encounter, we fall back on standard error messages, overly general or technical text, and confusing functionality.

The post goes on to offer a good overview of things to consider when, why, and how, borrowing a bit from Scott Burken´s  The Web Shouldn´t Be a Comedy of Errors. Recommended.

Error-message hits list

One could go on to reiterate the importance of tone (fault-free declarative or imperative) and the balance in the amount of information presented — but instead here is a little error-message hits list, as that is way more fun.

1. lp0 on fire (aka Printer on Fire) (Unix) – an error message with a legacy is still generated on some Unix/Linux operating systems for select printer errors. Line printers of yore used alcohol so a friction-related fire was thought possible. The original “printer on fire” message was a purely motivational message to users, trying to get them to check the printer under conditions Unix considered dangerous. No actual fire was occurring or necessarily imminent. Today, a CPU thermal failure can still yield “CPU#0: Possible thermal failure (CPU on fire ?)”.
2. Not a typewriter (Unix) – Haven´t received this myself, but imagine the surprise of learning this as you sit in front of your modern machine. (I think I would have to yell back at the machine “No kidding!”) Its origin is in the fact that “Typewriter” was what early UNIX systems called a terminal. The error message persists today, used to indicate that an attempt has been made to use a non-TTY device as a TTY device.
3. Fail Whale – Twitter. A must on any list for its iconic standing, and its innovative place in web 2.0 history.
4. Blue Screen of Death (Windows) – Infamous and truly terrible to behold.
5. The red ring of death (Xbox)  – No, not so much a message as a signal, but we get the message.
6. More new-fangled amusing error messages – Flickr, Digg, Technorati and Reddit server error notifications that are empathetic/humorous on purpose.

Digression: Am actually planning some of my own, with hopes that the IT-dept will be willing to deploy during the platform migration arriving at a theatre near me. Yep there is bound to be some stress involved with NTNU´s upcoming migration from Escenic to Liferay, and why not have some fun with it.

Make your own error message with the Atom Smasher´s generator.