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Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Other
7.2 Breaking Political Boundaries
Once in a great while computer stupidity has an impact on foreign relations.
A former co-worker was called to solve a problem. The problem was that a customer called saying that his 23-inch workstation monitor screen was cracked. The customer was a mining company in the Andes mountains. (We live in Chile, South America.)
Upon checking the manuals, they found the monitor's maximum operating altitude above sea level was lower than where the mine was.
My friend's superviser was worried that the monitor might blow up in someone's face and create a major incident. They sent him right away with a replacement.
When he arrived, they took him to where the workstation was. He took a long look at it, then licked his fingers and wiped the screen. The monitor hadn't been cracked. It was just dirty.
What follows is an urban legend. It is not true. It contains several historical and cultural inaccuracies. It does, however, make a compelling case for its moral.
SuperMac makes tape recordings of a certain number of technical support calls at random, to keep tabs on customer satisfaction. By wild "luck," they managed to catch the following conversation on tape.
Some poor SuperMac TechSport got a call from some middle level official...from the legitimate government of Trinidad. The fellow spoke very good English and fairly calmly described the problem.
It seemed there was a coup attempt in progress at that moment. However, the national armoury for that city was kept in the same building as the Legislature, and it seems that there was a combination lock on the door to the armoury. Of the people in the capitol city that day, only the Chief of the Capitol Guard and the Chief Armourer knew the combination to the lock, and they had already been killed.
So, this officer of the government of Trinidad continued, the problem is this. The combination to the lock is stored in a file on the Macintosh, but the file has been encrypted with the SuperMac product called Sentinel. Was there any chance, he asked, that there was a "back door" to the application, so they could get the combination, open the armoury door, and defend the Capitol Building and the legitimately elected government of Trinidad against the insurgents?
All the while he is asking this in a very calm voice, there is the sound of gunfire in the background. The Technical Support guy put the person on hold. A phone call to the phone company verified that the origin of the call was in fact Trinidad. Meanwhile, there was this mad scramble to see if anybody knew of any "back doors" in the Sentinel program.
As it turned out, Sentinel uses DES to encrypt the files, and there was no known back door. The Tech Support fellow told the customer that aside from trying to guess the password, there was no way through Sentinel, and that they'd be better off trying to physically destroy the lock.
The official was very polite, thanked him for the effort, and hung up. That night, the legitimate government of Trinidad fell. One of the BBC reporters mentioned that the casualties seemed heaviest in the capitol, where for some reason, there seemed to be little return fire from the government forces.
Ok, so they shouldn't have kept the combination in so precarious a fashion. But it does place "I can't see my Microsoft Mail server" complaints in a different sort of perspective, does it not?
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