of an @, set with tiny blue diamonds. Gush this must be worth a fortune. She felt a
magic attraction, and couldn’t help but put in on. It fit to her wrist perfectly. Whoever had lost it here? Of course many people came to the Helpdesk. She looked at the
bracelet and sighed. She felt as if someone had put it there just for her. She just felt it.
But of course she couldn’t keep it. With another big sigh she took the phone an dialled
‘Lost and Found’.
The security agent was very friendly, and asked her to bring it at some time of the day
convenient to her, he would make a note, if someone came and asked about it he would
knew where to sent him. Myra smiled thinking about the Email messages going to the
whole House regarding such lost and found things. People were desperate to get their
jewellery back. It was not only money value, it was also sentimental, as they took care
to make clear in those messages:
“I lost a ring probably somewhere in the Newton building. It is wrought in three parts,
tiny serpents with blue eyes. If you found it please contact me, it has been in the family for generations now and …”
“I have lost a very pretty pendant, a red stone inlaid in gold in maybe the Pink Bar. If you found it could you please bring it back. It is very important to me, it belonged to
- 270 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
my grandmother whom I liked very much. Please call Sarah at ... or Email me.”
“Yesterday I have lost a brown leather case for glasses, which had a special meaning
for me. If - by any chance - someone found it, please let me know where to collect it
from.
“Please excuse me bothering everyone but I have lost a gold ring. Square gold nugget
type with an adjustable band. Please, if you find it, would you contact me?
Thank you!”
I lost my heart to a prince, thought Myra, if someone finds it, would he please contact
me? shall I write an email about that to the whole House too? It had a special meaning
too and maybe – just by any chance - someone found it. But she knew she wasn’t
allowed to send an email to the whole House.
To those who didn’t know this Email Administration would then write an Email
reminding them that it was not allowed to send an Email to the whole House without
official permission, especially not for private reasons. A Forum on the Intranet Web of the House was there for such things among others. Were they to do it again, Email
Administration would disable their mailbox. Of course this never happened. The House
was not of the punishing kind, and always let everyone get away with everything.
That’s how one catches the Chaos virus.
Myra, or rather the Helpdesk Service Mailbox had been put in copy of such an Email,
because the sender, Oswaldo, was from her own MOU XII. Myra showed this to
Gwendoline, who had just stepped into her office:
“What am I supposed to do with this,” she said,”chid him?”
“Of course not. No one expects this. This message is just a formality. And Oswaldo’s
intention is rather nice; he just wanted to find a place to live for this trainee.”
“Truly they’re sort of cool at this place.”
“Yes. Take thieves,” Gwendoline said,”real thieves. Even those, if caught, are not to
harshly punished, and not sent away. First they are suspended a bit, and then come
back on a lower pay. And even that does probably not last forever.”
Myra felt as if Gwendoline was looking at the bracelet. But she would give it back of
course.
“The House sort of never punishes.”
On this Myra’s little friend Mikki came in, smiling. But the eager look on his face gave way to an expression of slight disappointment. He left just as quickly as he had come,
waving sadly, in place of having his usual piece of conversation with her. Well it was
probably because of Gwendoline, he was maybe being a bit jealous. By now everyone
was so used to him that people had stopped to wonder what he was doing here all the
time. His father was a freelance consultant at the House, that was all they knew, and
Myra had confirmed this.
“No,” said Gwendoline. “The House, typically, never takes revenge. They only let go
- 271 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
and do nothing about nothing. But tolerance can get to far too. One day a minority,
forever not obeying rules, will acquire an importance which is much greater than their
number. And with time some other minority will get so annoyed about them that it can
end in a dictatorship.”
True. What had Maurice said:
“Just look at one of the best examples. Why does no one ever do anything about Mrko
Mrnsk? Do they not see at all that this guy is bad? That he’s working on an evil plan?
Maybe he is paid by some enemy from the outside, in order to harm the House! He
could be the one to be so annoyed as to become the dictator.”
“Also true,” said Gwendoline. ”And then we Housefoncs are imposed all kinds of
bizarre duties, especially the one of swallowing just about everything! The proof is,”
she said, ”that nothing at all is ever done about those few people at the House who
really have the mentality of concentration camp capos. The House just lets them
continue their mobbing, at it is now called. Their staff of course is permanently
leaving, which has a result that they are given temporary staff from the outside world.
The House is really going to far in this respect. Take Yvonne, from Aeronautics WG.
This girl is really emotionally disturbed. She throws things at her colleagues. Coffee
pots and I don’t what. Of course she’s under great stress, but she’s more of a
Poltergeist than of a secretary. And who has to do her work plus her own? Nice
Chen-Li (keep the name on a line y choosing ‘Insert – Symbol – Special Characters –
Non breaking Hyphen’’) the second secretary there! They treat all those people like a
good asylum would treat their patients. With indulgence. And then we, the more sound
people, have to live with it and do for them! And get crazy ourselves. And be shut up
with the rest.”
After this little analyse of the House’s psyche Gwendoline left Myra to hang herself on
the phone again. The morning was the same jungle of calls as usual, and Myra didn’t
have a second left free.
Instead of lunch
Finally at one o’clock she forced herself to find the necessary ten minutes to take the
bracelet she’d found to the Lost and Found service.
Fox, the official there thanked her and took down her name. Myra left with a slight
twinge in her heart. Of course she had had to act like that; she couldn’t just have kept the bracelet. To keep would have been like thieving. But is it thieving if you keep
something that you feel to be yours?
Lexi and Sven went to eat white cheese at the White Cheese Bar, Hilde, Gwendoline
and Boris went to have Pasta al Olio, Lut went to see the Doctor, he found she had all
symptoms of stress possible imaginable, Maurice went to look at a new computer shop
on Grand Rue. Everyone was back in less then forty minutes, only Maurice took a bit
more.
- 272 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
Myra, back at her desk, stroked her wrist and felt lost without the bracelet. What was
hers was hers. And if to emphasise that feeling she got a call from Naoko about a lost
file.
Search for files you can’t find
Myra I have looked everywhere for this file, the Custom.dic. You know the
Custom.dic in Word. I have to delete a word from it. I added a misspelled name to it,
the name of my boss; it is a name I can never remember. I thus typed it in Word, right-
clicked on it, chose ‘Add’ and then I discovered it was misspelled. Well rather my boss
discovered this. Maurice told me I had to delete it from the ‘Custom.dic’ file but then
he ran away and I just can’t find this bloody file.
Myra was right to suppose she had to look for this file in ‘Documents and Settings’ and
then ‘Naoko Marikova’ (she was Japanese, married to a Czech) but she found nothing,
‘nic’. She felt embarrassed but had to beep the runaway, Maurice, for help. Maurice
came to her rescue, with his usual good-natured smile on the face:
“It’s because it’s in a hidden directory,” he explained. “Look, we’re going to unhide
the files.”
He opened ‘My Computer’ and chose ‘Tools - Folder Options - View’’ and select
‘Show hidden files and Folders’’.
The Search than hit the file indeed.
While she was at it Myra also selected: ‘Display the full path in the title bar.’’
“Once you’ve done this, you can use the ‘Search’ function, like it is explained on page
Error! Bookmark not defined. and you will find the file you’re looking for.”
But it still wasn’t enough, and they had to check ‘Search Hidden Files and Folders’ in
the Search Options. On that they did find it. The computer gave them a big friendly
- 273 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
smile. And because Myra had clicked ‘Display the full path in the title bar’ she could
see the Custom.dic was in:
C:\Documents and Settings\Naoko\Application Data\Microsoft\Proof.
“This is one of the many reasons why one can’t find a file: it is hidden,” said Maurice.
“Thank you Sensei or Grand Master,” said Naoko on the other side of the line.
While she was at it, Myra opened the Custom.dic and corrected the misspelled name
replacing the jzcyk at the end of the name with a jczyk.
She later discovered that one could do it an easier way too:
In Word choose ‘Tools – Options – Spelling and Grammar – Custom Dictionaries –
Modify’’ and add or modify or delete words there.
How many more ways would she find of doing this! This was the problem and the
solution with computers. It was just like in real life, there was not but one way of doing things. But one just had to find at least one. And the answer was to ‘Search’ and
‘Search’ again. And one could find, everything, even a prince.
Myra took advantage of this new knowledge to escape for a coffee at Tello’s. When
she came back to her desk, just as she wanted to close Word, she stopped. Someone
had written something in the document she knew to have left blank. A few words only
and her heart missed a beat:
In ‘Dolphin’ Font. She was more than a bit startled. However had this gotten there?
She was sure to have pressed ‘Ctrl – Alt – Del’ and the chosen ‘Lock Computer’ before
leaving for her coffee, like a good girl should do when she leaves her computer
unattended. Did someone know her password? Of course Maurice was capable of
knowing it. And the reader knows it, at least the first part (the second part being his
- 274 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
birthday, which the reader might not know).
She looked at the computer for an explanation. He must have seen who’d put it there,
the bracelet and now this sentence. But the computer didn’t give her a beep.
- 275 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
Poetic formulas
Hilde had lost at least one hour of work because Sven and Gwendoline had parked their
children with her, all of them boys, because they had to go to do some user support ‘sur place’. To Miki, Diego and Paco, Leo had then added Nino, his only son by his ex-wife, who was on a visit, and then Lut had turned up with Maxi and Ricky, looking
guilty. The six had sat there, and, even if they were not nagging for stories and
computer games, because they were all well behaved, their presence had been slightly
distracting to her. Other smaller children, not yet ready for some discipline, had been
galloping through the corridors all day long. One of them came in, but this one
remained silent. He just waved at Miki, who waved back and motioned him to come in.
They were now seven of them. All suddenly looking strangely alike. Looking at her
with benevolence. So well behaved, in fact, that it seemed not possible for such small
children. Hilde blinked, she was so tired, she felt she really was on the verge of
hallucinations most of the time. Should she give up working and tell them a fairy-tale?
One for each country? And moreover: shouldn’t those seven be with Myra? She was
quite certain about this, but couldn’t have explained why.
She was saved by Johanna who sent her own son Nicky to rid her of the children so
that she could work in peace. After all, Nicky was a grown up and had to train for the
job he was studying for. He planned to be a paediatrician. He was in his second
university year and had come to the House to print out a paper he was working on. The
House could thus pay for the paper and toner. The printout, however, was streaked with
white. Nicky took the toner cartridge out and shook it. It worked like magic and the
print was neat again. One can double a toner’s lifespan by shaking it. A trick he had
learned from his wise mother.
Nicky was Johanna’s pride. He was tall, beautiful, with an interesting face, a rare
combination. And of course the best marks at his Faculty. Johanna, quite tall herself,
looked adoringly up to him. He gave Hilde a brilliant smile and motioned the seven
little ones to follow him, leading them his trail like Konrad Lorenz his little ducks.
Hilde saw them leave with some regret.
At a later moment, when their parents computer was free, they played on it, and Hilde
could not help admiring their natural skill. If one forgot the skill of introducing viruses.
Well that was the beginning of being a hacker, and a hacker too had some sort of skill.
Gwendoline’s two sons played flight-simulator, and both managed to land the plane
successfully on their first trial. And not only that, but they had managed to land on the landing track precisely. She herself had taken more. Well not so much more but more.
The third attempt only had done it, on the first two she had crashed. That was exactly
what the little ones were now missing:
“Can I crash the plane Mama?” they had asked Gwendoline. Gwendoline nodded
- 276 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
absent-mindedly and Hilde was a bit a jealous because even if she had managed to
land, it had not been on the landing track.
She kept wishing she’d find a way out of this chaos. The wish was taking over her
mind, becoming omnipotent. She was exhausted, running after Phantom users.
Phantom WG’s. Phantom bosses. Or kidnapped bosses, like Jack and Josepha. Bosses
gone forever, like those of MOU VII.
No one knew what to do, nor did what appeared to remain of their CLA’s - bosses,
whom had been placed in their position by some strange authority, unknown to them,
unknown to anyone, unknown even by ITSELF. It was just like money, which
everyone wants, no one has, but which has taken a power of its own, not even being
human, and now goes on deciding. Such was the case here now with chaos. Chaos had
become the boss. Chaos was deciding.
The god of Chaos may be the most vicious one. His kingdom is darkness and his army
are demons. You cannot define him or catch him, he changes every day, at every
moment. He likes to dismantle, take to bits and pieces, to destabilise, to knock off-
balance, to strike at foundations. He is the god of pranks and dirty jokes. He can appear in many disguises, and the moment he stands before you, it is too late. One should
foresee him, avoid him from the start, not fight him. One cannot fight Chaos.
In this dreadful mess, she remained with only one wish: “If ever the day comes we
come out of this, let me least have acquired some new and important philosophy.”
To whom was she saying this? She did not even think of promotion or money. The
House, in exchange of throwing nobody out, did not promote. They couldn’t. Most
people there worked so well that they would have had to promote almost everyone to
being a CLA. And there were already all too many CLA’s. And once become a CLA,
they would have vanished. Well no, that phenomenon was recent, and would hopefully
not go on forever. So the only thing she could wish for some new philosophy, some
new meaning. Whish she could find some formula to solve the problem.
She dreamt of devising a formula to get out of chaos. If she succeeded, she would get a
Nobel price at least. Well probably no, someone would steal it from her (Hilde was a
pessimist regarding such matters). At least they still had their computers, who were
such a big help, if one treated them well. She gave her own computer a brave smile.
If you remember they were several factors she was still trying to sort out:
From experience, she knew: if one had 600 users, for one support person alone, one
would get 120 calls a day. If one had only 300 users, you’d say one would get 60 calls
a day. But no, it was more like 40 then. Why? Because when one had too much calls to
handle, one could not handle it, and users would keep calling back, because their sheer
amount would make they couldn’t be satisfied. If one could handle the amount of calls
better, and give the full answer to the user, he would not call back, but would be able to live for a while on the stock of answers he had got.
If, in a normal situation 600 users made 120 calls, and 300 made 40 calls, how many
- 277 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
calls would 150 users mean? She could have seen it in a increasing order too, but
thanks no. She took her Excel but couldn’t make it out.
with the underlying formulas.
Of course, as Maurice said, she would need at least a third number in order to be able
to make some formula out of those speculations.
A helpdesk could take the number of calls as being representative of their amount of
work. If another factor of difficulty was added, this would of course increase the
amount of calls. In the present situation, to the amount of users, came at least four
additional factors:
The reorganisation of the MOU’s. The office moves. The forever coming and going
people. The new programmes. The number of calls would not be progressing in a
simply proportional way.
Again Flavia’s observation came into her mind:
Was it like with the law of combinations in statistics, and would it be multiplied by a
factorial, and would be not 4 times more calls but 4 x 3 x 2 = 24 times more calls, like in Flavia’s theory.
Of course if the amount of calls was to grow even more they would not be able to
answer anymore at all and one day there would be no more users to call at all... They
would give up on ever busy lines. Awful, but swell. Formulas excited Hilde like others
would be excited by sweets or pretty people
When exactly was the border crossed which made all of it too much, impossible to
handle? How could it be foreseen? Hilde regretted of having slept through her statistic
course, the teacher having been such a mean bore, because since she had met with
computers she just loved the topic. Along with Maths. Better late than never, but where
was her formula?
Moreover, the structure of the MOU’s and the WG’s in it were changing by the hours.
Randomisation sets, binomial, 2x2 cross classification, could those be the things she
needed? How could one find a formula for a ever changing structure? Hilde felt like
- 278 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
juggling, not in real, like Arthur with four, but mentally and with eight balls. She got into a state of wonder and flew out to foreign planets. If only she’d have the time she
would go there. Find some Martians who could help. In the meantime those formulas
comforted her; they were like soothing hands over her tortured mind. She saw them
like a poem which verses had a life of their own.
She could have spent hours reflecting over those numbers and formulas.
Was Flavia’s theory the one to follow?
Was it Intrapolation or Extrapolation, like Maurice had suggested?
How to find the third missing number? Or how to find some already existing formula?
Some mysterious formulas in Excel.
Trend()? Or Forecast()? which calculates, or predicts, a future value by using existing
values. Improduct()? Impower()? Imaginary()!
She realised the functions were not preinstalled in her Excel and chose Tools – Add-Ins
– Analysis Toolpak to install and load the additional functions. She then chose ‘Insert –
Function’.
There it was: Imaginary()
No, that was just bathing in nice sounding formulas.
It was twenty-nine minutes over five and Hilde stood up quickly because she WAS
going to go home today at official office closure. But then the phone rang. What devil
made that she couldn’t help taking the call!
“Hilde you have to help me,” cried Kirsi at the other end of the line. ”My document
is such a mess and I have to sent those 5000 letters out by tomorrow morning. It’s an
invitation to all the representatives of the Open Science Foundation, we’re already a
week late! I don’t know what happened, I had all the labels on a diskette and then I
couldn’t open it anymore and now Maurice says it’s corrupted and he can’t get it back!
“You have been working from on a diskette!”
“But yes.”
“And you haven’t kept a copy of it anywhere else?”
“But Kirsi! You must never work from on a diskette! Diskettes get corrupted just like that. What do we have Hard disks and network resources for. Diskettes are only for
storing documents. You must copy the document to the Hard disk to work on it and
then copy it back. Fussy or not!”
“Yes I had taken them home to work on them there and I worked on the diskette, but
now it’s too late. Please help me. Please.”
She was hysterical of course.
“But don’t you have anything left of those addresses?”
“Yesss ... Sort of, but they are not in label format, just in Word, all the addresses
- 279 -
The Crazy HelpDesk
written one after the other. But I have to make labels out of them.”
Hilde brightened: “At least you DO have the addresses in Word.”
“Yes but the format is so wrong.”
Hilde stood up, sighing, and went to Kirsi’s office. She was so tired she felt faint. Kirsi had red and swollen eyes:
“I have worked all week to copy and paste them addresses onto labels in Word and
now it’s all gone. Just when I was done it all suddenly crashed and Windows gave me
the message ‘File system not found.’ Maurice tried to repair the diskette with some
‘Repair diskette’ software but didn’t succeed. He says he can’t do nothing. Moreover
he said I shouldn’t have left the diskette near the phone, but too late, I did. The phone has send out bad waves. Like it was hexed! And then Maurice made fun of me and
said:
‘Oh Kirsi, I cannot but send you to some guru, Wise Bibi or so, maybe your diskette is
blocked by bad schpirit and Wise Bibi he can try to make inkantaschions, apposchition
of hands, un-schpell the sching, Bibi might know how to do it.’ I didn’t know Maurice
was so heartless.’
She began to cry. Hilde tried to soothe her:
“Maurice was probably only trying to make you laugh. Can you show me the document
with the addresses in the wrong format?”
Kirsi’s eyes brightened up with hope and she opened the document. She was positive
Hilde would help her.
Hilde logged onto Kirsi’s PC with the remote Dameware programme and used the time
it took to make some morals:
“But you must not keep such important documents on your hard disk either Kirsi, you
must put them on the network resource, where they are backed up every day.”
Hilde did so with a ‘File Save as’ and then, inspected the document. Her head was
swimming but it was, in fact, well structured. She meant the document, not her head. It
contained address after address, separated by two or three return characters. If there is some structure, then a macro or programme can be made and handle it quickly. Slowly,
she began to smile. Kirsi heard that over the phone, one can always hea