Sysadmin recalls VP who mistook disk error for a hacker named “General Failure”

A former systems administrator has shared a classic example of how technical error messages can be misread in surprising ways.

The reader, identified as “Lee,” said the incident took place around the year 2000, when he was a newly certified Novell and NetWare engineer helping run servers and desktop support for a large retail company’s headquarters. As his responsibilities grew, he became the person colleagues turned to whenever something broke.

One Friday afternoon, a vice president phoned to say he could not open files on his PC because, in his view, another person was already using them. Lee asked whether the executive was seeing a standard “file in use” notice from an application such as Word or Excel. Instead, the VP reported an error that appeared to mention “General Failure,” which he assumed was the name of a hacker or intruder.

Lee then asked the executive to read the message carefully. The text turned out to be “General failure reading Drive C:”. That wording pointed not to an attacker, but to a likely hard-disk problem on the machine.

In other words, the company was not dealing with a malicious user under the alias “General Failure.” The PC’s storage device had probably failed and would need replacing. Lee arranged for support to visit and told the VP he might be getting a new disk, or possibly a full replacement computer.

The anecdote is a reminder that user reports often depend on how error messages are interpreted, and that a quick read-through can make a big difference when diagnosing a problem.