Tuesday, November 29, 2011

He's Dead, Jim

I know a woman who recently lost her partner.  His name was Jim. In the weeks to follow her loss, she noticed a message on her computer, "He's Dead, Jim," when she shut down her computer.  Her first inclination was "spooky," the second inclination was that someone was playing a very cruel joke.  Because she couldn't consistently reproduce it, I asked her to take a picture of it so that I could troubleshoot it.  It was flashing on her screen so even getting a picture wasn't easy.  This isn't exactly what it looked like, but close enough:


After googling the message I figured out that this happens when you are using Google Chrome as your browser.  If you shut down your computer while Chrome it is still open, this message comes up.  I couldn't reproduce it on my PC but it does happen consistently on hers now that we know what is causing it.

Apparently, an engineer at Google thought that it would be funny to use Dr. McCoy's words (when talking to Jim Kirk) in this message without considering how many people out there know someone named Jim and who will some day die.  Stumbling on this at the wrong time, could be a very shocking experience.  

I found this on Youtube.  It is a compilation of all Dr. McCoy's death pronouncements from the original Star Trek: He's Dead, Jim.

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