Dept of Utterly Useless Error Messages

[Tom Horsley]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 07:51:44 -0500
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> My favorite came from an old AT&T SysVr3 box.  It was:
> "Error: should not happen".

Ah, if we are gonna dig up errors from the good old days,
my favorite was always the IBM JCL error something like:

IEF020I DCB ERROPT=ABE and/or no SYNAD exit specified.

When you looked it up in the trusty messages and codes
manual, you'd get the vastly improved version:

IEF020I The DCB ERROPT was set to ABE and/o no SYNAD exit
was specified. Programmer action: Correct error and
resubmit job.

Now that's what I call helpful! (For those dying to know,
the actual error was always that the $#@! operator in the
comp center mounted the wrong tape on the wrong drive :-).