This comes to you from my time as a professional Web developer in the Research and Development (R&D) department of a particular corporation. One of the developers printed and put up a "Programming Horror Stories in Six Words" page on the team's notice board. Over time, the rest of us added to it. From memory, here are some of the items that were on it:

• It has to work with Apple.
• It has to work with IE.
• It works on my machine!
• Oh my God, it died!
• All I want to do is ...
• I don't understand why it's doing that!
• I don't have the source code.
• I don't know why it works.
• I'm not able to fix it.
• The previous developer left the company.
• It uses a proprietary data format.
• It's a closed-source/proprietary project.
• Changing it will probably break it.
• I'm afraid changing it'll break it.
• The terms of use have changed.
• I don't know that programming language.
• The remote backup files are corrupted.
• It uses lots of Flash content.
• The site's images don't display properly.
• The browser's downloading the PHP code.
• Somebody introduced and committed a bug.

There are probably plenty more that professional developers have encountered, but the above (including variations thereof) were some of the frequently-cited ones where I worked.

For some content in a similar vein, see the BOFH excuses. (The first link is to a file that can be used with the fortune-mod CLI utility. That could be used as a basis for turning the above list into a compatible file. The third link is to a Web page that picks an excuse at random. To get a new excuse, refresh that page.)

Thumbnail image: fortune cookies copyright Wikimedia Commons