5 years later i get a call. "We have a weird error message it says ... How did i even get here! This error is bad and you should feel bad."
I experienced something similar when troubleshooting some Chrome issues across a Citrix XenApp farm. It was so incredibly useful to be able to ask the users "Did you get a dinosaur or a He's Dead Jim?" One was a connection issue I could disregard, the other was the memory management problem I was trying to track down.
Sometimes I wonder if we should make all our cryptic, developer-only errors absurd and memorable. I've never had a user tell me anything like "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space error". "The lemur jumped the shark again" gets their attention.
This happens to me all the time with the software project I work on, which is enormous and has been around for a long, long time: the error messages usually aren't very useful. Neither is the log. In fact, the log is often little more than all the debug messages created during development.
What I'm saying is take the unique error code and add an absurd/funny phrase to the number. It's easier for people to remember an odd mental image than it is ERROR CODE -42.