In 1683, the Turks were besieging Vienna and it looked like the city would fall before the allied armies could arrive. The Emperor was out of the city at the time, and had a messenger sneak in to find out what the situation was like in the city. The garrison commander (Ernst Rüdiger, Graf von Starhemberg) sent the messenger back saying that the situation was "hopeless, but not dangerous!"
In the end, the city somehow held out, and the allied armies broke through to lift the siege.
Ruediger's words reflect a typically Viennese sense of humor. I come from a Viennese family. I adopted it as my .sig at a time when I felt particularly harried yet knew that somehow everything would work out in the end. It ended up staying at the bottom of my e-mails ever since.
For the historically-minded, here’s some other trivia.
When the Turks were routed, they abandoned their camps so quickly that they left everything behind, including a whole lot of these mysterious hard brown beans. The messenger who snuck through the Turkish forces to facilitate the communication between Rüdiger and the Emperor was honored after the battle, and the Emperor granted him one wish. He asked for all of these funny beans, which no one else knew what to do with. The wish was granted, and he opened the first coffee shop in Vienna - a great success and the resulting trend became the center of Viennese daily life ever since.
Meanhwile, Rüdiger, the garrison commander, came from a distinguished
line of Austrian aristocrats dating back to the early Middle Ages. The
Rüdiger who appears in the epic poem Nibelungenlied was a direct
ancestor. Another Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, who was a direct
descendent, was a leading Austrian anti-Nazi, vice chancellor under the
regime of Engelbert Dollfuß. When the Nazis assassinated Dollfuß
in 1934, Starhemberg led the crack down on Nazis operating in Austria,
although he was passed over for chancellor by a weaker person. By 1936,
as Hitler got stronger and Mussolini could no longer fully guarantee Austria’s
sovereignty, Starhemberg was dismissed and went into exile.