Indeed, the printer thinks "continue" means "continue printing" (or, more usually, "continue futilely trying to print", since usually the reason I'm cancelling the job is because I accidentally submitted it in such a way that it wanted US Letter paper of which the printer contains none).

In particular, "Exit" seems like a really weird word to use in this context at all: nothing is exiting anything in the literal sense, and even the nonsensical usage of "exit" in UI context to mean "terminate a running application" doesn't apply in this case.

A simple "Cancel job? Yes/No" would be *much* clearer!

It's interesting that pretty much everyone seems to have the opposite interpretation to the printer though :) I had the same reaction as mooism below.

A simple "Cancel job? Yes/No" would be *much* clearer!

... as long as the UI designer didn't fall into the trap of using that wording with three buttons labelled "Yes", "No" and "Cancel". (The admin interface on the self-checkouts in Tesco does that, or at least did last year.)

Indeed, they could go even further and label them something like "continue printing/cancel printing" and then you wouldn't have to read the whole thing. (Except that many printers have inadequate displays, so that _might_ be too long.)

And yes, we're now at 20 votes for "Continue" and none for "Exit". I was fairly confident that people would generally vote against the printer, but wouldn't have bet on them doing so quite this unanimously!

Perhaps the internal software architecture is such that selecting the "exit" option causes some process to execute exit() or System.Exit() or whatever.