404: Not Found

Dave Weingart and Tom Smith

404: NOT FOUND

Words: David Weingart ©1997
Music: "307 Ale" (Tom Smith)
All Rights Reserved- lyrics posted with permission of the author

There's pages you will see, me lads, on every site you hit
There's "Marilynne's Bedroom," "JezzieCam Live!" and piles of other...stuff
There's net and edu, org and com, and sites the whole world 'round
And the most annoying thing you'll see
Is 404: Not Found, me lads, 404: Not Found.

CHORUS:
     404: Not found, me lads, 404: Not found
     The document that you have tried to access ain't around
     Oh the network may be slow and dead
     Or the server may be down
     A thing seen often on the Web
     Is 404: Not found, me lads, 404: not found.

It started out in Switzerland at a little lab called CERN
Where a couple of the physicists would share what they had learned
They coded up a protocol they called http
And they never dreamed how often people afterwards would see

CHORUS

They let it out upon the world to see what it could do
But they didn't count on overload by sev'ral powers of two
A couple bytes per packet lost and things start running slow
Then timeout hits and on your screen this message starts to show

CHORUS

I do my best, type the address, see what few bits I glean
And what I mutter 'neath my breath quite frankly is obscene
It takes a while to find a file, I don't know who's to blame
But I'm sick of that error code and so I wrote this flame!

CHORUS

There's many pages you will see, at least if you get through
Two hundred thousand access tries the same time just as you
A host is moved, or can't be used, or maybe it's just fate
And if you don't believe it try to use the World Wide Wait!

FINAL CHORUS
     404: Not found, me lads, 404: Not found
     The document that you have tried to access ain't around
     Oh the network may be slow and dead
     Or the server may be down
     You see it 'til you're raging red
     And you wonder where your data's fled
     There's nothing makes you hate the Web
     Like 404: Not found