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”.
Was this some occult illusion? Some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.
Carefully, I weighed my options.
These three seemed to be the top ones.
Clearly, I must now adopt one –
Choose: “Abort, Retry, Ignore”.
With my fingers pale and trembling,
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee
Finally I pressed a key —
But on the screen what did I see?
Again: “Abort, Retry, Ignore”.
I tried to catch the chips off guard —
I pressed again, but twice as hard.
Luck was just not in the cards,
I saw what I had seen before.
Now I typed in desperation,
Trying random combinations.
Still there came the incantation –
Choose: “Abort, Retry, Ignore”.
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!”
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”.
[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/ who claims ownership.]