Dear internet, you're annoying!

How many times has your computer thrown up the most infuriating error messages? Well, you’re not alone
The Internet can sure be a royal, shooting pain in the derriere, and that’s putting it very mildly. Because the last thing you want when you’re on a social networking site, trying to accept a friend request, is the appearance of a twit of a box telling you ‘Oops, no doughnut for you today’.And after a hard day’s work, when you come home to leisurely surf the Net, and you get a message that informs you, ‘Unable to locate host,’ it gets worse. Your irritation hits the peak when you desperately try to enter a page and are told pertly, ‘Bad File Request’. Ironical, because, isn’t one of the reasons we have become obsessed with the computer is the sense of unquestioned superiority it affords us? Well, not anymore — more over supremacy, enter supreme irritation.
After an especially rough day at work, spent in the company of unruly codes and blustering binaries that refuse to do her biding, it pains software engineer Apoorva K to see a, ‘Network connection refused by server,’ while checking her mail. “I don’t like the tone of these error messages,” she says indignantly, “They’re so authoritative and uppity — it’s like they’re designed to get on your nerves.”
Media person Rathi Kumar believes that when one is working against a deadline and is desperately trying to access the mailbox, one must not be subject to lines like ‘Still working,’ and after two minutes, ‘Hmmm...still working.’”
If there are blatantly irritating messages, there are ones that are so smartass, you want to swipe them on the back with an electric baton. “Some sites take immense pleasure in saying ‘Whoopsie!’ when you really want them to stop behaving like ditzy blondes and get the work done,” points out game developer Hari Prasad, “There are some other cocky ones too — for example, ‘A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation’ and ‘Oops this wasn’t supposed to happen.’” Other notable ones are ‘Operation completed, but that doesn’t mean it’s error free,’ and ‘Forbidden/ Access denied.’
And as if to rub salt on the wound, some irritating error messages come accompanied by equally irksome cartoons, illustrations and even animations! Graphic designer Alok Mitra rues, “Some companies have gone to great lengths to ensure that messages come with illustrations that do little to assuage your temper whilst working on something important.”
However, turns out there is a humane side to these error monsters too, because some of them do come across as remorseful, when they tell you a heartfelt, ‘We’re sorry for the inconvenience.’ “I especially like the message which says, ‘Is it something we did?’ when you try to deactivate your account,” says architect Deepika Shah, “And then, there’s another cute one which reads, ‘How embarrassing, something went wrong’. Some of these messages do cheer you up at times.”
And at the end of it all, come to think of it, if you were to sit in your leisure and analyze these monstrosities, you could actually derive a smug satisfaction out of them. Really, what better satisfaction than have a boxy computer telling you that you can’t have a cookie or doughnut or whatever other damned food item, when you’re happily nibbling away on an Oreo cookie? Or when it spouts nonsense like, ‘An error occurred while displaying the previous error,’ and you know it will have to slave it out single-handedly to get each of those dratted errors sorted out?