May 14th, 2007

Service required * Brewer error *

Last year, one of the fancy-dancy iCup devices (yes that’s its name, I kid you not) in the kitchen of my building went on the fritz. Things break, that’s to be expected. The screen which normally guides you through the selection process instead displayed an error message.

Service required
* Brewer error *

The problem was not that it was out of coffee; when that happens, a much more specific error is displayed. Something like, um, “Out of coffee“. No, this time, there was some sort of weird internal error that prevented the machine from working. Fortunately, this was only one machine in a two-machine cluster, so the second machine could assume the extra load without interrupting service. This didn’t stop people from making jokes about it, though. Attached to the machine was a note that read

gle=109
ERROR_BROKEN_PIPE

Another joker wrote

Java runtime
failure

Computer programmers think they’re so clever.

(Meanwhile, Matt Sampson is not convinced that everything that comes out of the coffee machine is actually coffee.)

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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