Like a Deer in Headlights

Have you ever seen this? It's the notice you get when you've forced a restart on your mac. And it drives me bananas. Why, you ask?

It doesn't help that when you see this notice, you are already cranky because you've just had to force a restart on your computer. It's usually when you are very busy, and were running a bunch of apps on your machine, so most likely you're also ticked off that you've lost some work, and there's a good chance that you're stressed because of a looming deadline.

And now you've been given cryptic instructions and a time constraint. Lovely.

You've been given 46 seconds to parse a message that seems shoehorned in because the buttons themselves can't do their job.

"You shut down your computer because of a problem." Thanks, news.

"If you want to open the applications that were open when you shut down, click Open." Umm...let me read that again.

"If you do nothing, the computer will continue the login in 46 seconds" Wait. With or without the applications?

So, now I think I get it. If I click "Open", it will open and restart the applications that were open when I restarted. Which I definitely don't want to do, since that's what overloaded the system in the first place.

I can wait for 46 seconds, which somehow is stress-inducingly short, and an eternity to wait at the same time. How is that possible?

Or I can hit the mysterious "Cancel". Cancel what? Cancel the restart? I don't want to do that! I know it sounds ridiculous, but this message throws me each time, and even though I know "Cancel" is the right choice, part of me still worries that if I click it, the machine will just shut down again. Crazy, right?

I wish I could say I know a better way to do this. I see how the button text can only be one or two words, and I'll be darned if I can come up with ones that encapsulate all this information. But, hope springs eternal, so I believe there's a better option out there somewhere. Any ideas?