My friends, I am beset on all sides by malfunctioning electronic equipment. My desktop computer keeps rebooting itself for no good reason, the voice mail light on my phone won’t stop flashing, the right speaker on my stereo keeps cutting in and out, my vibrating bed no longer functions with the necessary subtlety, and my laptop is so pressed for resources that it is starting to swell up and leak fluid like a blister. Meanwhile, old web browsers and email clients are crashing, hardware drivers are not working, and none of the technical sites I bookmarked three years ago to solve my problems show as having valid addresses.

All is not lost, however, due to the efforts of a courageous few:

The 404 Research Lab
The code “404” is HTTP talk for “File Not Found”. If you follow a bad link or type in an invalid address on an active server, your classier websites will come back at you with their own customized 404 message telling you the link is outdated, or that you typed it in wrong. (My website does not have one of these pages.) The 404 Research Lab is a compendium of the finest “File Not Found”s on the World Wide Web.

Errorwear
Errorwear takes advantage of 404 and its assorted erroristic friends by transplanting them straight from the computer screen onto high-quality cotton T-shirts. Included are new favorites such as “403 Forbidden” and the legendary Windows Blue Screen of Death?, but who can forget such classics as “Bad command or file name_”, or Macintosh’s “Sorry, a system error occurred.”? Nobody, that’s who. Not if we keep them alive via the means of wearing them as T-shirts on our bodies!

These brave websites show that only by confronting our difficulties can we gain a new perspective on the past — and move forward into the future.