No Information Is Better Than Wrong Information
This is a perfectly good error message, it's just not what was wrong at the time.
Cannot Open Printer Driver
Source: Microsoft Excel 95.
Cause: Opening one spreadsheet on the floppy disk, and a different one on the hard disk, then removing the floppy from the drive and trying to print the hard-drive spreadsheet.
Instead of printing the spreadsheet immediately, Excel tries to access the floppy drive first (to do what? I don't know), and gives the error that describes the main thing it was trying to do when it failed. It should ignore this problem since it is irrelevant, or at least tell me that the problem is that there is no disk in drive A: and that the printer driver in drive C: is fine.
Submitted by: David J Grabiner
This is pretty typical of what's wrong -- too often -- with the error messages provided.
It's also kind of like the joke about the chopper pilot who was lost in a Seattle fog then, through a fluke, he found a clear spot and could see someone in an office. The lost pilot quickly scrawled a message asking "Where Am I?"
Then, when the person inside held up a response saying: "In a helicopter", the pilot nodded and immediately set course for the airport.
When his passenger asked "How did that help? Why do you know where you are now?", the pilot replied: "We had to be at Microsoft. Where else could I get an answer that was technically correct but also completely worthless."
<Previous: Bad Advice>
<Next: Still A Stupid Message>