There you are rushing your way through the airport to catch a flight. When you look up at the big board of departures to find your gate, what's staring back at you? The blue screen of death. We've all run across a very public system crash or two in our time, where an innocuous software crash has been broadcast by Jumbo-tron to the eyeballs of thousands of travellers, convention go-ers or passers by.

This Flickr pool is a collection of those little moments the sysadmins of very public machines wish you'd never seen. Fried payphones, non-functional gas pumps, and belly up ATMs. As the cameraman behind the photo above wrote, "Something about seeing windows errors pop up at airport terminals doesn't give me a good feeling." I couldn't agree more.