Franchu’s lair

Today I received a mail from Maja that had this nice poem in it and wanted to share it with you

It is a nerdy version of the great poem The Raven from Edgar Allan Poe

The Computer

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
Systems manuals piled high and
wasted paper on the floor,

Typing with a steady hand,
I invoked the SAVE command,
and waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.

Deep into the monitor peering,
long I sat there wond’ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the disk kept churning,
turning yet to churn some more,

“Save!” I said, “You cursed mother!
Save my data from before!”

One thing did the phosphors answer,
only this and nothing more,
Just, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

With my fingers pale and trembling,
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending,
hoping all would be restored,

Praying for some guarantee
Timidly I pressed a key.
But on the screen there still persisted
words appearing as before,

Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted,
haunted, as my patience wore,
Saying, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

I tried to catch the chips off-guard
I pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine:
I begged and cried
and then I swore.

Cursor blinking, angrily winking,
blinking nonsense as before.
Reading, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

There I sat, distraught,
exhausted by my own machine accosted
Getting up I turned away and paced across the floor.

And then I saw a dreadful sight:
a lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me,
shocked me to the core.

The lightning zapped my previous data,
lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

To this day I do not know
The place to which lost data go.
What demonic nether world is wrought
where data will be stored,
Beyond the reach of mortal souls,
beyond the ether, into black holes?

But sure as there’s Makumba, JSTL,
Java and even more,
You will one day be left to wander,
lost on some ParaDe shore,

Pleading, “Clean, Compile, Reload?”

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