Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bed sheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read “Abort, Retry, Ignore”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nWas this some occult illusion? Some maniacal intrusion?\n
\nThese were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.\n
\nCarefully, I weighed my options.\n
\nThese three seemed to be the top ones.\n
\nClearly, I must now adopt one –\n
\nChoose: “Abort, Retry, Ignore”.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nWith my fingers pale and trembling,\n
\nSlowly toward the keyboard bending,\n
\nLonging for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,\n
\nPraying for some guarantee\n
\nFinally I pressed a key —\n
\nBut on the screen what did I see?\n
\nAgain: “Abort, Retry, Ignore”.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nI tried to catch the chips off guard —\n
\nI pressed again, but twice as hard.\n
\nLuck was just not in the cards,\n
\nI saw what I had seen before.\n
\nNow I typed in desperation,\n
\nTrying random combinations.\n
\nStill there came the incantation –\n
\nChoose: “Abort, Retry, Ignore”.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted;
Getting up, I turned way and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw an awful sight,
A bold and blinding flash of light,
A lighting bolt that cut the night and shook me to my very core.
The PC screen collapsed and died,
“Oh no — my database”, I cried.
I thought I heard a voice reply,
“You’ll see you data — Nevermore!” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To this day I do not know
The place to which our data goes
Perhaps it goes to Heaven where the angels have it stored.
But as for productivity – well,
I fear it has gone straight to Hell.
And that’s the tale I have to tell –
Your choice: “Abort, Retry, Ignore”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Not my work, it was attributed to “anonymous” in my original posting of it. Recent interweb searches turn up https:\/\/www.poemhunter.com\/bridgid-patrick\/<\/a> who claims ownership.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary, System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor, Longing for the warmth of bed sheets, Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets: Having reached the bottom line, I took a floppy from the drawer. Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE … Continue reading “Abort, Retry, Ignore”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[36,43,35],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fiction","tag-poem","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194,"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scriven.ca\/~scriven\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}