Completely tangent here but back in 2005 one of the early programs me and my cofounder wrote included a try catch which spitted out something like variable not found. We were just out of college and didn’t really pay much heed to the possibility of our code ever getting into the catch. And one of us had the variable christened as “baby”. Code went into production and one of user got the error message “baby not found”. Well thankfully our end user who found the error message found it funny and cheered him up.
So we go either helpful or quirky on error messages most often and apologetic if the situation demands it.
Reminds me of the panicked woman who hit F12 while on FB, saw the log message "forcing children into a div", and concluded she had discovered evidence of child abuse. I believe this was before FB printed the big ASCII art "STOP!" message to console.
Back when we first got a computer, my mother was highly concerned by the Windows 9x error message "Your computer has performed an illegal operation and must shut down"
So we go either helpful or quirky on error messages most often and apologetic if the situation demands it.