To save or not to save....

A curious incident occured at work the other day.

Preparing to leave within the hour, I was shutting the horde of windows that were flourishing in the multiple desktops I got on my powerbook. Incidentally that's the only good feature the mac has. Apart from that it sucks turd. MACs are not cool.

Anyway all sorts of programs are being killed now: excel spreadsheets, word docs, db viz, terminals, text editor, safari windows, ie windows, citrix, vpn etc. Lots of little windows for saving and warnings popped up as expected. The weird one was from a text edit document that had some junk temporary copy-and-paste stuff. The little window I got for the text file had three options:

SAVE
CANCEL
DON'T SAVE ME

The last one was there for a fraction of second before changing back mysteriously to:

DON'T SAVE



I know you'll argue that I was bleary-eyed and fatigued and may have imagined it all. To that I say all y'all are the same hick folk that don't go believing i ran over( passively as a passenger) a live fish. Anyway, it's obvious what had happened. The little text file had developed AI after I copy and pasted some SQL queries into its corpus. Maybe it was weary with electronic life and recognized me as some sort of organic Angel of Death.

Here's the dilemma, usually a program will ask for an order. i.e. SAVE= Do you want to save this file, CANCEL=Do you want to cancel etc. But DON'T SAVE ME is directive. The little bastard was telling me what to do!

Sentient or not, no lame ass text editor tells me what to do. I decided to prolong its sorry existence by saving it onto my desktop and pasting more SQL queries into it. But wait! What if the runt was being sarcastic or maybe trying some sort of patronising reverse psychology. Damn you Hal!

Anyway I killed that sorry ass text editor without prejudice.

The lesson learnt here is that when messages are sent electronically, its important to use emoticons. Without some sort of indicators its hard to understand the tone of the message. This is illustrated below

DON'T SAVE ME :( - this would be some sort of pathetic plea. I would would have pitied the fool. Click you're dead.

DON'T SAVE ME :O Another genuine plea with urgency. The Angel of Death would be quick. double click.

DON'T SAVE ME :P -cheeky bastard, i would have killed it and cleared the caches to reduce the chances of AI ectoplasmic activity. Click you're dead and quartered.