Well,

Back in my days of VB programming, I used to make "front-end" and "back-end", as well as the "user interface" for database programs, and tons of utility programs ( to make up for the lack of them, within the OS ).

One of my biggest "pet peeves" was making sure that anything that wasnt expected, or "planned" to happen, was brought to the "users" attention, this, in itself, lends itself to a myriad of possibilities. Even some of my own scripts in Kanotix, do this... either in comments, or, in, out-right "echo's" to the screen...

I have a script I made to transfer files from one system to another, the script uses another script, that I made, to handle openning a secure shell (root) session to the other system, and also mounts the complete hard drive tree of the other system. In the mounting script, I do not assume the "remote" hard drive tree is mounted, and check, to see if it might be "pre-mounted" already... if it isnt, a comment states that it isnt, and we try mounting it... after the mount, we test again, to see if its mounted... if it is, we be OK... if it isnt, a nice, polite, echo is pasted to the screen stating: "we attempted to mount 'system x', it must have failed! Major BOO-BOO here! Cant handle it! You look at it! Im crashing now! BYE!"

In some of my database days, in VB, and in Windows - when we attempted to shift indexes, in a complete 10,000 entry database, and something was "wrong" or "unexpected", I usually popped up a nice error message, to inform, probably me, of what it was doing, where it was at, and, just how bad it was, or IS... Errors commonly used by me, were, of the nature:

Code:
Database index shift in progress.
*** At entry 554 of 20,503 = "text of the entry".

PROBLEM!
MAJOR!
DISSASTEROUS!!!
UNRECOVERABLE!!!!!!!

WARNING: Database is CORRUPT! Unable to recover from "error: xxxxxxxx"
Database is being left in UNUSABLE STATE! Manual recovery is needed!

*** SERIOUS ***
Database is the LIVE version! ( hope you had a backup!! )

ADDENDUM:
This is going to catch some major head-rolling!
( as a side note: is your resume current? )
This would have been one of my "early" database conversion programs, later versions, started to make backup copies first, have the ability to follow a log file of what "exactly" it was doing at the point of crashing, and, yes, have recover ability... Considering that "I" would probably be the only one seeing the above message, I could do away with any "pleasantries" of an error message, and state exactly, not mincing any words, what was wrong... As I started to program in a "work" environment, my messages had to become more obscure, and fall back to using log, or error, files for my output. What someone might see, on one of those programs, seeing the same from above, happens, but, at work, it might look like this:

Code:
Something "unexpected" happened!
CONGRATULATIONS! You did something that I hadn't planned for!

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
PLEASE:
*** Contact "technical support" to claim your PRIZE!
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
With the above message, to the user, examinine the error log, or audit log, it might have spewed about 30 to 50 lines of messages on just "exactly" went wrong, and where. One program I wrote, a MAJOR crasher, had echo statements to the audit log on, what option was picked from the menu, what section the code was in, where it was called from, how many calls, and a complete tree of the subprocesses ( functions or subs ) that had been called, and in what order. Considering the program ran, for, I think it was five hours, dealt with billions of dollars of transactions, and disk space was a premium, we couldnt run from a backup copy, or even have the space for a backup file, it had to be run on a "live" database, it was catastrophic when it crashed. It took, even with all the audit trail log entries, at least three hours to recover from a "minor" boo-boo, a "serious" one, could take as much as ten hours, to even get the database back to its "original" pre-run state. The program, which was actually, about ten sub-programs in chain, was more than 100,000 lines of code, and that was without the autil log entries, echos, displays, this was just the "processing meat" of the program. Spent tons of time working on it, making changes to functions, subprocesses, routines, etc... in hopes to make it more "robust" to crashing, but, it was still a bugger when it ran ( lots of finger crossing from the support people, thats for sure )

About the funniest error message I ever saw, and one of our "programmers" like to use it, it was there own "calling card", and they usually used it, when, lets say, words can not express, how much "doo-doo" the error has caused, was, just a simple word:

Code:
***** OOPS! *****
They usually used a nice, RADIOACTIVE icon symbol for the error pop-up, too - was rather fitting

Ms. Cuddles