Senryu (literally ‘river willow’) is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to haiku, with three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. Senryu tends to be about human foibles, while haiku tends to be about nature; senryu is often cynical or darkly humorous, while haiku is serious.
Assembled from the Internet is a collection of senryu about software and computers:
A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
A file that big?
It might be very useful
but now it is gone.
A mouse can be a
computer mouse or it can
be a furry mouse.
Aborted effort:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask way too much.
Alone in my cube.
My sticky note has been lost.
Please reset password.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent and reboot.
Order shall return.
Control-alt-delete.
Digital hari-kari.
Three-fingered salute.
Errors have occurred.
We won’t tell you where or why.
Lazy programmers.
Everything is gone;
Your life’s work has been destroyed.
Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
so beautifully.
For a new PC,
Center of my universe,
I abandon all.
Hal, open the file.
Hal, open the damn file, Hal.
Please, Hal, open file.
Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.
Hunger, grown in me,
making me ravenous, so
I ate your rough draft.
I ate your Web page.
Forgive me. It was juicy
and tart on my tongue.
I hate computers.
G*d damn f***ing piece of shit!
Re-install Windows.
I looked at your disk
but there is nothing on it.
Want to reformat?
I type with two hands,
fingers flying, not looking.
Submit, damn typos!
Life is so hard now
that I have lost my data
These computers suck.
Login incorrect.
Only perfect spellers may
enter this system.
Monitor is blank.
My expression is too.
What does I/O mean?
No keyboard present.
Hit F1 to continue.
Zen engineering?
Oops, I have just crashed.
You will have to restart me,
and you lost your work.
Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
but we never will.
Printer not ready.
Could be a fatal error.
Have a pen handy?
Program aborting.
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.
Rain, drifting gently
through youthful maple blossom
has fried your hard drive.
RAM and ROM and bytes,
Gigabytes and CD-ROMS,
but no file found now.
Rather than a beep
or a rude error message,
these words: “File not found.”
Seeing my great fault
through darkening blue windows,
I begin again.
Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
Server’s poor response
not quick enough for browser.
Timed out, plum blossom.
Sleepless night again.
Hear the persistent silence
of memory leak.
Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.
The code was willing,
It considered your request,
But the chips were weak.
The MBR claims
no operating system
exists. Try again?
The Tao that is seen
is not the true Tao, until
you bring fresh toner.
The ten thousand things.
How long do any persist?
Netscape, too, has gone.
The Web site you seek
cannot be located but
countless more exist.
There is a chasm
of carbon and silicon
the software can’t bridge.
Three things are certain:
death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
This site has been moved.
We’d tell you where, but then we’d
have to delete you.
To have no errors
would be life without meaning:
no struggle, no joy.
Visit the home page.
It can’t be done easily
when the site is down.
Virtually home;
Morning light glints on a strand,
another web page.
Wind catches lily
scatt’ring petals to the wind:
segmentation fault.
Windows Vista crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
With searching comes loss
and the presence of absence:
“My Novel” not found.
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.
You sit there staring
and the screen saver appears
to cover your work.
You step in the stream,
but the water has moved on.
This page is not here.
You tried to explore
my BIOS limitations?
Your FATs are corrupt.
Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
Article published on February 29, 2008
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