Haiku Helps: Poetic Guidance for a New Age

Three things are certain:

Death, taxes, and lost data.

Guess which has occurred.

Everything is gone;

Your life's work has been destroyed.

Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?

Windows NT crashed.

I am the Blue Screen of Death.

No one hears your screams.

Seeing my great fault

Through darkening blue windows

I begin again.

The code was willing,

It considered your request,

But the chips were weak.

Printer not ready.

Could be a fatal error.

Have a pen handy?

A file that big?

It might be very useful.

But now it is gone.

Errors have occurred.

We won't tell you where or why.

Lazy programmers.

Server's poor response

Not quick enough for browser.

Timed out, plum blossom.

Chaos reigns within.

Reflect, repent, and reboot.

Order shall return.

Login incorrect.

Only perfect spellers may

enter this system.

This site has been moved.

We'd tell you where, but then we'd

have to delete you.

Wind catches lily

scatt'ring petals to the wind:

segmentation fault.

ABORTED effort:

Close all that you have.

You ask way too much.

First snow, then silence.

This thousand dollar screen dies

so beautifully.

With searching comes loss

and the presence of absence:

"My Novel" not found.

The Tao that is seen

Is not the true Tao, until

You bring fresh toner.

The Web site you seek

cannot be located but

endless others exist.

Stay the patient course

Of little worth is your ire

The network is down.

A crash reduces

your expensive computer

to a simple stone.

There is a chasm

of carbon and silicon

the software can't bridge.

Yesterday it worked

Today it is not working

Windows is like that.

To have no errors

Would be life without meaning

No struggle, no joy.

You step in the stream,

but the water has moved on.

This page is not here.

No keyboard present

Hit F1 to continue

Zen engineering?

Hal, open the file

Hal, open the damn file, Hal

open the, please Hal.

Out of memory.

We wish to hold the whole sky,

But we never will.

Having been erased,

The document you're seeking

Must now be retyped.

The ten thousand things

How long do any persist?

Netscape, too, has gone.

Rather than a beep

Or a rude error message,

These words: "File not found."

Serious error.

All shortcuts have disappeared

Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

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Washington Apple Pi Infrequently Asked Questions
Haiku from the Internet
Initial idea by Mary Evans
Revised by Lawrence I. Charters