To: jeroen Subject: customer service ... -------- ------- Forwarded Message [many fwds deleted] > > Subject: Stressful tech call > To: Customer Service; TechSports > > A friend of mine is a chief engineer at SuperMac, and he related this > story to me. > > SuperMac records 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 ... of the legitimate government of Trinidad. The > fellow spoke very good English, and fairly calmly described the > problem. > > It seemed that 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, continued the Trinidad government official, 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. > > O.K., 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? ------- End of Forwarded Message