The System 274: Quitting Unexpectedly
September 9th, 2009

The System 274: Quitting Unexpectedly

It seems to go along a bit with Rosscott’s Law, but dealing more with the aftermath.   Whatever the situation, let this comic serve as a public service announcement: SAVE YOUR WORK.

Have you ever had this happen to you?  What programs seem to quit the most on you?  What was the worst situation? Post in the comments!

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^ 13 Comments...

  1. MasterGlitch

    I once worked on a project for about 3 hours straight, without even looking up. But then the program crashed, and I hadn't saved even one time since I started. I seriously considered smashing the monitor over my head at that point (but I decided that would just make it all worse). Now I save more often than a hummingbird flaps its wings.

  2. Chibby

    *enters code with typos* *save* *fixes typos* *save* *enters more code* *saves* *fixes bugs in that code* *save* *etc* is pretty much how I roll…

  3. Hillel Kitty

    Happened yesterday, in fact! Waited until the last minute to type up some committee meeting minutes (of course), and saved all along. Word *acted* like it was saving. But did it? N-o-o-o-o! Got done, saved it again, and Word locked up. No auto-recovery file, either. And (of course) I'd already scribbled over my notes from the meeting, X-ing stuff out as I'd entered it. Yeesh. Had to re-write it, and ended up going to bed at 5 AM, just to get up for work 2 hrs later.

  4. Rossmon

    Facing the same problem every single day, I complete the form (Yeah, well, I do have better things to do–I know, most of you don't think so.) I live in the hope that someone will read it. (How naive of me.) I would no longer exist if I sit here and just constantly send the messages–over, and over, and over… (Aside from that, unless I kept a steady supply of chocolate next to me, I'd starve and–eventually I would have to make a trip to the market (fooled you on that "trip" thing, didn't I?).

    Of course it then asks if you want to restore the previous session, and it doesn't.

    Anyway, I have tried be polite and then a little more stern, then, as etiquette dictates, all caps, then all caps w/a ton of exclamation points. Still, nothing.

    Finally, I just say (yes, out loud), "I surrender to your power" and get up and walk away. Now, it can't say the "employee has quite unexpectedly", so I suspect, it (or the people behind it who are taking copious notes on how long it takes before people do give up) say, "Gottcha!!!!!"

  5. Jay_Dubb

    Took some work home over the weekend. Spent about 10 hours updating various reports and saved to an external hard-drive. Went to my office Monday morning and tried to copy files from the external drive back to my C: drive. Instead it overwrote the files on the external drive with the older ones. All that work, GONE! Wanted to break stuff!

  6. Adrian Elliot

    SAVE OFTEN.

  7. Slifer

    An employee quit the day before he was supposed to deliver a complete franchise kit and left me with his "work" which consisted of mainly doodles in illustrator so I had to pull an all-nighter creating over 20 proucts and my lack of sleep somehow made me retarded and i never saved, once i finished everything and tried to save the program kinda farted and then took a massive dump on me by shutting down…
    Needless to say my clients were very pissed

  8. Caffiend_Kevin

    Photoshop was my bane before I upgraded the ram. Worked for 2 hours coloring the comic for the next day, was just about to hand it over to Blondieto do the text and it froze. The worst part is I could still see my work on the screen, but I couldn't save it, it was like that scene in "Cliffhanger", my beloved comic was falling out of reach, and I was helpless. F#&K you Adobe!!!!!

  9. kpepper

    Not the worst, but the silliest was for a week straight illustrator was crashing every time I tried to change the type size…definitely re-taught me to save. No idea what happened, it seems to have resolved itself just fine since then. Crazy possessed computer.

  10. Justin

    If it's a computer with important work on it, can any quitting truly count as "unexpected?"

  11. DFade

    I can't figure out anything more frustrating than a while back when I had a high-end image manipulator that used to crash the whole system when "Save As" was clicked [but not Save, unless it was operated on an untitled piece of work]. Unluckily, I used it maybe once or twice a month, so I never remembered before it was too late…

    That's the joy of Windows and non-photoshop series products for you, alright.

  12. PWK

    get a mac

  13. Rosscott, Inc. » Archive » Quitting Unexpectedly

    [...] has been going around the internet for the past week or two. I think it’s based on this comic I wrote, but I’m willing to admit other people have good ideas too. [...]

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