July 27, 2009, 7:09 PM — 
"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that." With those icy words 2001's HAL set the gold standard for computer error messages: menacing, but not particularly informative. Sadly, in real life error messages tend to achieve these goals without even HAL's panache. Sure, you get the occasional stab at a first-person plea for forgiveness (like the simple but effective message from an ATM shown above), but usually they're either full of arcane jargon, or contain meaningless words of reassurance that cover over the arcane jargon that you actually need to diagnose the problem.
It's bad enough when the error messages pop up on your PC's monitor in the privacy of your own home. But with so many public displays -- many of them quite prominent -- driven by consumer-grade hardware, sometimes these dialog boxes can show their faces in the most awkward of situations.
Picture courtesy of sssteve.o
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Errors on a grand scale
The production designers of 1982's Blade Runner, who created future cities in which advertising scrolled seamlessly across every available surface, may or may not have expected that their vision would be realized just a couple of decades later in Times Square. But for a movie that focused on how things might go wrong when it comes to artificial humanoids, they seemed to forget that the humble machines driving those ads might occasionally hiccup as well.
This error message was up on one of Times Square's enormous digital billboards for more than five hours. It's letting you know that the virus definition files on the computer running this thing are out of date! Thank goodness the machine didn't come down with some kind of computer virus, as that would have been publicly embarrassing.
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Land of a million pop-ups
Do you know what's more frustrating than an error message? An error message that seems to spontaneously spawn another error message, which spawns another message, and so on, until your screen is littered with them.
You know what's even more annoying than that? When all this is happening on a public kiosk, where you have no access to a mouse or any other way to stop them. This seems to be a printing kiosk of some kind; still, I'm betting that you're not supposed to be able to see the Windows printing dialogue, and that you're definitely not supposed to see the seven (by my count) error pop-ups.
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Subtle, but troubling
That little pop-up word balloon at the bottom of the screen of this Western Union machine in Tunis will be familiar in form to anyone who uses Windows XP. It's telling you, in French, that automatic updates have been disabled and that and that the firewall isn't activated. Now, that could be because the machine isn't connected to Internet, so it doesn't need a firewall and can't download updates; or, it could mean that an important piece of banking equipment is a sitting duck for Internet attackers. If it's the former, customers shouldn't be able to see this message; and if it's the latter, well, maybe it's a good thing that they can.
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If it has a screen, it can have an error message
Everything has to have video in it these days in order to be worth a darn, even previously audio-focused items of manufacture like electric guitars. After all, a generation that grew up watching vaguely psychedelic lightshows on their monitor as they listened to their iTunes library won't put up with a guitar that produces sound but no images. Unfortunately, a video guitar can go awry in ways worse than just feedback.
Check out that little glimpse you get of the Windows desktop at the bottom left of the screen. See that Firefox icon? Do you think Les Paul is happy that he lived to see the day when you'd be able to get a guitar with a built-in Web browser?
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A plea for help
Of course, not every computer has a big fancy screen with a full-scale windowed GUI to send error messages to. Sometimes their only contact with the outside world is a few lines of ASCII text. How are they supposed to let us know that something's gone terribly wrong? The computer that's supposed to be telling us how many spaces are available in these two parking garages was caught in just such a dilemma, and resorted to desperate measures, using the only two screens at its disposal to indicate that its system had, in fact, faulted.
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What we have here is failure to communicate
Not all embedded computing devices make the most of their communication possibilities like our resourceful parking garage sign, however. This bus may have had something to say to its passengers on the sign normally reserved for route and stop information, but you'd never know what it might be; instead, you'd just have to sit there in your seat, trying not to make eye contact with two dozen or so tiny, expressionless faces that are staring down at you for no reason that anyone human can discern.
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An enduring icon
Oh, look, it's another Windows error on another wall, just like our first item ... except you can't make this one go away now matter how often you click on "OK," or even if you press Ctrl-Alt-Delete. That's because it's been painted onto this piece of wall art, which just goes to show how deep these error messages have penetrated into our psyche. At least it wasn't a "Loading..." dialogue box, as unsuspecting passers-by might just sit there indefinitely, waiting for the entire work to appear.
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