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[Ñ]

This must be an ongoing topic, and yet I see none on the first page or on the stickies... so I must. I'll shut up and move to the cursory cursed thread if there is one, but until then...


Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bed sheets, still I sat there doing spreadsheets.
Having reached the bottom line I took a floppy from the drawer,
I then invoked the SAVE command and waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.

Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond'ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the disk kept churning, turning yet to churn some more.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token.
"Save!" I said, "You cursed mother!  Save my data from before!"
One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

Was this some occult illusion, some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices undesired, ones I'd never faced before.
Carefully I weighed the choices as the disk made impish noises.
The cursor flashed, insistent, waiting, baiting me to type some more.
Clearly I must press a key, choosing one and nothing more,
From "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

With fingers pale and trembling, slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee, timidly, I pressed a key.
But on the screen there still persisted words appearing as before.
Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted, haunted, as my patience wore,
Saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

I tried to catch the chips off guard, and pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine: I begged and cried and then I swore.
Now in mighty desperation, trying random combinations,
Still there came the incantation, just as senseless as before.
Cursor blinking, angrily winking, blinking nonsense as before.
Reading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted.
Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw a dreadful sight: a lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to my very core.
The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

To this day I do not know the place to which lost data go.
What demonic nether world us wrought where lost data will be stored,
Beyond the reach of mortal souls, beyond the ether, into black holes?
But sure as there's C, Pascal, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more,
You will be one day be left to wander, lost on some Plutonian shore,
Pleading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"



¡Ñ!


[1]:http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/abort_retry_ignore.poem

[Supercharazad]

Eh?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Welcome, Ñ. The Curses forum is for discussion of other games by Bay 12 Games besides Dwarf Fortress; the name is a reference to the "Curses" console drawing library that Tarn Adams used to develop most of his pre-DF text-based games. With that in mind, please direct any amusing poems you feel compelled to share to the General Discussion forum -- even if they happen to have the word "curse" somewhere in them.

[Gatleos]

It makes me happy that there are people out there with enough free time to convert the works of Edgar Allan Poe into computer jargon-laced poems about data loss.

[Little]

I think he's complaining about the errors in LCS through poetry.

[jester]

one of the better 'random nut' posting ive seen.  Good show old boy.