> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.

Confession time.

I used to be prone to giving things slightly silly names, particularly unrecoverable structured exceptions. Examples include PancakeLandingException, ReallyBadException, CataclysmicException, ApocalypticDeathException, and the like.

And then years and years ago I used to work for a company called Redgate and I started a tradition of slightly silly messages when early access builds of our .NET products would expire, all based on Monty Python sketches and quotes. So, obviously, the dead parrot sketch featured in there.

So far, so harmless, but this did come to a head somewhat spectacularly and in a couple of different ways.

Firstly, in 2009 one of my colleagues used a modified quote from The Life of Brian as an expiry message on a build. Somebody who appeared to be some sort of religious zealot complained loudly to the company. We were both in LA at the time, with a couple of other colleagues, attending build 2009, so we woke up to a chain of something like 50 panicked emails in our inboxes with people expressing differing levels of outrage and/or amusement whilst discussing various grovelling apology options... until someone figured out that it was actually an elaborate troll that we'd swallowed hook, line, and sinker. I can't remember the name of the person who caught us out but, hats off, well played, sir, well played. It did unfortunately mean we became a bit more cautious and business-like with our early access build expiry messages.

Secondly, and this one needs a bit of context setting... I've always been a fan of descriptive and explicit error messages: there should be enough information in any error message that most of the time the user can figure out what's wrong and fix their own problem OR at least so that if they get in touch with support, then support can quickly figure out the problem and get back to them with a solution. I'm not a fan of unhelpful, information poor, obfuscatory, or cryptic error messages.

But when I wanted to cause an application to exit because there'd been an error related to tampering with our licensing code I played somewhat against type. I wanted error messages that would uniquely identify what had happened, making it easy for us to figure out, whilst giving the user no clue (because I wanted to make it very slightly harder for hackers/crackers - but let's be real: this would never have actually stopped anyone). So I used successive lines of dialogue from a scene in House where House is trying to guess who Wilson's girlfriend is. I have no clear recollection of why I chose this dialogue to reproduce, but... I did.

Anyway, this did lead to some slightly confused support requests coming in from users mostly trying to use the tools legitimately in slightly unusual scenarios, but nothing that was overly burdensome. That was until early 2011, when Greg Young - he of event sourcing fame - posted the following gist because he'd encountered an error that said, "Because I wanna ask you about your girlfriend. I must know who she is, or you would've told me her name.": https://gist.github.com/gregoryyoung/871736.

Not at all creepy, right? And, of course, it went viral on twitter. Cue another massive email thread although, this time round, people just thought it was funny. However, we did decide to make the error messages a bit more boring and, in the end, I just gave them numbers.

Mostly I'm just glad the error Greg got wasn't the final line of dialogue in the exchange between House and Wilson: "Yo mamma." That would have been bad.