h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I work in suppport in the London office of an American software company. Occasionally, the system gives an error message that says something incompehensible followed by "please call [name of our software company] support". So the user dutifully calls the support department, and we can't work out what the error message means, and as far as the user can tell the program's functioning ok apart from this random error message, and we can't find anything wrong with their data. Evantually we're forced to admit that we can't see a problem and that we don't know why they got an error message, and the only sensible explanation is that it's some American programmer having a laugh at our expense.

Or it could have been inserted by a contractor who, knowing his (ok maybe her but statisically more likely to be his) contract was running out, and knowing there is more money in support than in design, put in the random error message in order to maintain his contract, after all would you let a contrator go if the software is still not working.

Apologies to all contractors out there

Chris