Today, I attempted to log into the Sanger computing cluster, and was presented with the following error message:
> ssh farm2-login
You don’t exist, go away!
I was somewhat taken aback by the snappy tone from a usually jovial machine. As much to reassure myself as anything, I enquire who the computer thinks I am.
> whoami
whoami: cannot find name for user ID 12722
I see, so the computer is claiming to not know who I am; that to it, I have ceased to exist, or have never existed. Given that I was in work yesterday, it is unfortunate that the computer would forget about me so rapidly.
I attempted to reassert my existence, and was met with this:
> su lj4
Sorry.
The resigned sadness of this message is haunting. The computer would be refusing to meet my eye, if it was able to do so in the first place.
I cannot help but feel that my machine has done something terrible, something that fills it with guilt and shame, something that it knows I cannot forgive. It greets me with shock and anger, then with denial, and then finally with a guilt-weary apology. What has happened? Should I be reassuring my machine? Growing angry with it? Or panicking blindly as the sense of unease and mounting horror rises sharply in my breast?
In the end, I go with turning it off and then on again.
Your computer system has such personal error messages! My computer just bleeps at me if i enter something wrong, it never makes arguements against my existance.