Thermostat
Thermostat
[Hairy, with a headset on, is sitting in an office chair at a desk with his hands ready on the keyboard of his computer.] Hairy: Tech support, how can I help you?
[Cueball is on his smartphone while looking at a small blinking panel on the wall in front of him.] Cueball: The little LCD on my thermostat says Error: Android system recovery: Unrecognized boot volume "/MONTHLY ENERGY REPORT (1).DOC"
[In a frame-less beat panel Hairy just stares at his screen with his hands on his lap.]
[Back to Cueball, now with Hairy's reply coming from the smartphone in a box with a jagged arrow pointing to the smartphone.] Cueball: It's asking if I want to partition the volume. What should I do? Hairy (on the phone): Have you tried walking into the sea.

Hairy is working at a tech support office, and receives a call from Cueball . After the scripted greeting, Cueball, who has the most bizarre tech issues , tells Hairy that his thermostat – a single-purpose device used to control indoor heating and air conditioning – is showing an error screen from the Android operating system , and asking if he wants to partition the volume. The Android error seems to imply that it is trying to mount a file with .doc extension (likely a Microsoft Word document ) as the boot device . An added twist is the "(1)" in the filename, which is commonly appended when a user attempts to copy a file into a directory that already has a file with the same name. Furthermore, the extension .docx has been the default option from Microsoft Office 2007 onwards rather than the earlier .doc extension used in the comic, implying that the file is likely a rather old one.
The error message suggests a system problem at a low level of the device. Not only is the operating system missing, but the device is trying to locate the operating system inside a Microsoft Word document, something that has little to do with regulation of temperature and probably has no way of getting onto the device in the first place, let alone being considered as a bootable file.
This is so abnormal that Hairy is briefly struck silent and, upon recovering, he suggests Cueball walk into the sea as a form of suicide, rather than try to solve the issue.
The title text elaborates that the situation is so absurd that it must be divine punishment, so Hairy does not want to try and help him for fear of invoking the wrath of whatever deity is issuing it. An example of such reasoning in literature can be found in the character of Aeolus in the Odyssey , who, having made an unsuccessful attempt to assist Odysseus by giving him a bag containing unfavorable winds, refused to provide further assistance on the grounds that the gods were clearly hostile to Odysseus.
Part of the humor is in the problem being only a slight exaggeration of real software issues. The symptoms are unlikely, yet possible (a thermostat could be running Android and could generate a report as a .doc file; given some data corruption, the name of the .doc file could get into the boot script and a volume could appear unpartitioned). It would take an expert Android or Unix engineer to fix, particularly on an embedded device with no obvious way to connect remotely or attach a keyboard. In real life, it would probably be easier to just replace an embedded device whose software was this broken.
This is explored further in 2083: Laptop Issues where throwing Cueball into the ocean is mentioned. Both comics could explain the original "computer problem link to oceans" comic 349: Success .
[Hairy, with a headset on, is sitting in an office chair at a desk with his hands ready on the keyboard of his computer.] Hairy: Tech support, how can I help you?
[Cueball is on his smartphone while looking at a small blinking panel on the wall in front of him.] Cueball: The little LCD on my thermostat says Error: Android system recovery: Unrecognized boot volume "/MONTHLY ENERGY REPORT (1).DOC"
[In a frame-less beat panel Hairy just stares at his screen with his hands on his lap.]
[Back to Cueball, now with Hairy's reply coming from the smartphone in a box with a jagged arrow pointing to the smartphone.] Cueball: It's asking if I want to partition the volume. What should I do? Hairy (on the phone): Have you tried walking into the sea.
