Please contact an intelligent life form with your error code.

Hight ranking on my list of things which annoy me are programs and people who assume, somehow, there is some godlike figure silhouetted in a mysterious server room who knows everything known about computers along with a few things we have yet to discover. He's never had a compilation error, he's memorized the error codes. He quotes man pages. He's credited in the fortune file. He wrote the memory management utility for Microsoft Windows during work experience. He can even program using a Mac. He's ready and (secretly) willing to solve all my petty end-user issues.

Somehow, despite having administrative privileges and being the only existing user on my Windows computer, if anything goes wrong, I have no alternative but to brace myself, knock tentatively on his door and ask if he could trouble himself to assist me at workstation 13. His deep booming voice assures me he will be along in second.

This is primarily a Microsoft phenomenon, but it crops up all over the place. Why do they do that? "Please contact your system administrator". Microsoft prides itself on being user-friendly, aimed at the masses. WHY does their help and error console not even briefly consider the possibility that you are not a feckless office drone with no computer skillz? I think it's fairly safe to say that, out of the office, there is no such thing as a system administrator, or if there is, he's also known as Dad. So what is with the system administrator bull? it's not even a realistic "Install program, or ask your system administrator to"; it converses absolute conviction you are not your own Sysadmin. As my own Sysadmin, this really, really, really gets on my pex. (Oh, btw I've started leering like Cat, speaking like Rimmer with Lister's idioms and Kryten's facial expressions. It's really annoying).

The most annoying thing I've encountered so far in Vista (I bare use it) apart from it's slowness and surreally egotistical tenancy to do whatever the fuck it thinks is best (rather than, more traditionally, what I tell it to do) is the screen it shows when installing updates. Whenever I log on to windows, there are updates (They might be the same updates, in fact, they probably are...). The screen appears when it is installing updates prior to shutting down. Adorably, it reads "Please do not turn off or unplug your computer. Doing so may permanently damage the Windows system.". The poor dear who wrote this probably got transfered to user interface typography after a swift dismissal from catering incited by putting a sign on the vending machines saying "Please do not enter the code 789654, or you might get free candy".