Nevermore

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.
Typing with a steady hand, 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.
"Save!" I said, "You cursed PC! Save my data from before!"
One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

Was this some bizarre 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 "Choose Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

With my 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-
I pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine: I begged and cried and then I swore.
Now in 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 core.
The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
And no "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

To this day I do not know
The place to which lost data go.
What dreaded nether world is wrought where all lost data will be stored?
Beyond the reach of mortal souls? Beyond the ether? In black holes?
But sure as there is C, Pascal, and Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more,
One day you'll be left to wonder, data trying to restore,
"Will I see it nevermore?"

Heh...I remember when I got that message when I messed around in DOS as a little kid. It never seemed satisfied with the answer I gave it.

To the tune of Camptown Races:

File or Directory
Not Found, Not Found,
File or Directory
Not Found Today.

Heh, I remember my sister and I trying to get through DOS on our old Tandy. Came up with that thing above after getting a few too many "not found" messages.

Anyhoo, to the tune of Beck's "Loser"...

In the day of sysop nerds I was a flunkie
Jolt in my brains and body feeling chunky
With the plastic mouse balls spray paint the Commodore
System install with the hard drive on the floor

Kill the process and put it in /dev/null
Email flaming with the user hitting D-control
Shell's called Reno and it's written in C
Got a couple of xterms, keys set to repeat

Root came sayin' I'm insane to complain
About an online wedding and a stain on my screen
Don't believe everything that you make(1)
You get a cracker from Europe and a login that's fake

So write your code in Perl in the dark
Saving all your hacks for working at a tech park
Yo - punch it

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Double dense floppy)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?

Forces of evil in a MUD/MOO nightmare
Ban all the members in a phony #chat channel 'cause
One's got a handle and the other's got a .plan
One online spammed the other and ran

With the FTP and the insane print job
The daytime crap of the alt.test slob
He hung himself with a call to ping
Twenty milliseconds and it's spitting out another string

RTFM if you can't relate
Trade the Sun for a car and the Web for a date
And MIME is a nifty hack for mailing to a newbie
That's choking on my MPEGs

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Get crazy with the caps lock)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Drive-by BIFF post)

\...
Yo, bring it on down
\...
I'm a hacker, I'm a winner
Program's gonna work, I can feel it

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(I can't retrieve you)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(NULL)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Sprecken sie DOS, eh, baby)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Know what I'm typin'?)

:)

IMJack said:

Anyhoo, to the tune of Beck's "Loser"...

ROFL...thats the funniest thing I've heard in a while, and I didn't even get 1/3 of it.

Mwhahaha that Beck one fits perfectly.

The Edgar Alan Poe :Raven, one fits perfectly :)

hehehe, classic stuff
/me copies and pastes to a text file

Did I fail to mention that Loser is like my favorite song?

And its not even industrial!

Heh, I like Fod's version much better than Poe's =)

OK, somebody post "All About The Pentiums".

Heh, that was pretty cool, fod. :)

Heh. This has been all over the net for years...

http://www.google.ca/search?q=nevermore+abort+retry+ignore&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

For other interesting variations on this...

Lüt said:

OK, somebody post "All About The Pentiums".

It's All About The Pentiums

It's all about the Pentiums, baby
Uhh, uh-huh, yeah
Uhh, uh-huh, yeah
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!
(Yeah!!)

What y'all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?
Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard?
Yeah, payin' the bills with my mad programming skills
Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM
I never feed trolls and I don't read spam
Installed a T1 line in my house
Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mizouse
Upgrade my system at least twice a day
I'm strictly plug-and-play, I ain't afraid of Y2K
I'm down with Bill Gates, I call him Money for short
I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support
It's all about the Pentiums, what?
You gotta be the dumbest newbie I've ever seen
You've got white-out all over your screen
You think your Commodore 64 is really neato
What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?
You're usin' a 286? Don't make me laugh
Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You're the biggest joke on the Internet
Your database is a disaster
You're waxin' your modem, tryin' to make it go faster
Hey fella, I bet you're still livin' in your parents' cellar
Downloadin' pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
And postin' "Me too!" like some brain-dead AOL-er
I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller
You're just about as useless as jpegs to Helen Keller

It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!

What y'all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?

Uh, uh, loggin' in now
Wanna run wit my crew, hah?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the king of the spreadsheets
Got'em all printed out on my bedsheets
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!

Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
My digital media is write-protected
Every file inspected, no viruses detected
I beta tested every operating system
Gave props to some, and others? I dissed'em
While your computer's crashin', mine's multitaskin'
It does all my work without me even askin'
Got a flat-screen monitor, 40" wide
I believe that yours says, "Etch-A-Sketch" on the side
In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user
You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total-loser
Your motherboard melts when you try to send a fax
Where'd you get your CPU, in a box of Cracker Jacks?
Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you
If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you
What?

It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!
It's all about the Pentiums!

What y'all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?
What?

Weird Al is cool, he did a vid to that but I can't find a working link :(

Heh, I was fortunate enough to catch the vid the one time I turned on MTv last year. Good stuff.

Oh machine, you are sick.
Merry-less peril as I sit here and stare,
Data evaporates in fusty air.

If I were a bard I'd write you verse,
As beautiful as gawky Bill Gate's hearse.
A social outcast I will always be;
Temerity with false technology.

As I now actually have a publisher (whoo-hoo!) this ode to fodders is actually the property of Praxis, along with everything else I write, apparently, which is quite amusing.

Computer Haiku
Actual error messages from Japan...

A file that big?
It might be very useful
But now it is gone

The Web site you seek
Can not be located but
Countless more exist

Chaos reigns within
Reflect, repent, and reboot
Order shall return

Aborted effort:
Close all that you have worked on
You ask far too much

Windows NT crashed
I am the Blue Screen of Death
No one hears your screams

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that

Having been erased
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped

Serious error
All shortcuts have disappeared
Screen. Mind. Both blank

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

Stay patient course
Of little worth is your ire
The netwark is down

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone

Three thing are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data
Guess which has occurred

You step into the stream
But the water has moved on
This page is not here

Out of memeory
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will

How many megs of RAM do you have in computer?
Technology's gay!

Hey, why don't you check out my website at www dot...
Technology's gay!

I was looking at the Star Trek website and I, um...
Technology's gay!

Let me fax you my e-mail address...
Technology's gay!

Out of memeory

Origionaly registered January 2001

That would be a joke.

Lüt said:

OK, somebody post "All About The Pentiums".

Dammit, fraggle beat me to it. I had been intending to post it when I first saw the Raven parody, but I never got around to finding the lyrics until three minutes ago...bleh.

It was funny to pioint it though.

So Fods...Did you make that? It's...really good.

I rarely "make" anything, lazy fod usually finds what he wants to say has been said somewhere, and I learned cut'n'paste is cool :)

Nuno Correia said:

How many megs of RAM do you have in computer?
Technology's gay!

Hey, why don't you check out my website at www dot...
Technology's gay!

I was looking at the Star Trek website and I, um...
Technology's gay!

Let me fax you my e-mail address...
Technology's gay!

ANAL CUNT!!!!!!!!!!111111

hahahahahahahahaha

Wheeee, another AC fan!

/me sells doomsick's dog to a Chinese restaurant.

fodders said:

I rarely "make" anything, lazy fod usually finds what he wants to say has been said somewhere, and I learned cut'n'paste is cool :)

Really? we never noticed!

fodders said:

I rarely "make" anything, lazy fod usually finds what he wants to say has been said somewhere, and I learned cut'n'paste is cool :)

Wow! that's beautiful, who wrote that?

Scientist said:

Wow! that's beautiful, who wrote that?

link