“It’s so true, what Jakinda just said! I complete, since she had to hang up: Our work,
like a tree not allowed to go through all its seasons, can never bring its fruits to term.
People of the MOU, non stop, have to begin everything from scratch again. The mess
is growing and growing, and there seemed to be no way out of it. It almost needs a
divine intervention to get us out of this.”
Gwendoline laughed:
“Divine! I just met Consuelo. She always makes me think of Shiva. I think Shiva could
do it. But Consuelo refused. This was typical of her. But maybe she’s just pretending in order to act more freely.”
Gwendoline printed out a joke she’d gotten just this morning:
The one who each morning:
is busy like a bee
strong as a bull
works like a horse
and the evening come, is tired like a dog
should consult a veterinary surgeon
because he’s probably a mule.
She handed it over to Hilde. It was not even a good joke, nor poem, but so true. Hilde
left, laughing mildly. But it was weird. Working like in the ridiculous poem seemed to
denote the typical Housefonc. Why indeed did they work so much. For the Good or
God of Science?
Like Rosie whom she met on her way to another user. Rosie was bent into an L form
from some mysterious backache, and dragged her workload like an ox along the
corridors, face swollen from pain, but when Hilde wanted to send her home she just
shook her head and said she had too much to do:
“Work loves me. Work is MADLY in love with me; when it sees me, it comes running,
arms outstreched, calling out my name like a kid who hasn’t seen his mother for days
long. Just as I seem to do with my boyfriend, my own mother, my father, my best
friend. For making kids myself, I have had no time yet. For instance, Daniel Spitz, my
CLA, left at 17h00 saying that he had to drive his kids to the dentist and I was going to say that I had to leave earlier too, because I still had to make some, but he was already gone.”
When Hilde was back at her office she found an email forwarded from the central CHD
mailbox, it was Werner, a very nice CLA from the Astronomy WG, asking for
someone to come by in order to get his printer working again. The email was dated
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from 3.30 in the morning.
Alex dragged himself to work while suffering from severe stomach pains.
Tam sat over her dossiers with a splitting ever lasting headache.
Penny, arms laden with dossiers, tripped on her fatigue and flew down a whole flight of
stairs at 21hoo in the evening. She lay there, dazed, for about 30 minutes, with no one
to come by. Let’s talks about cameras and security. Luckily, she had good bones and
got away with a giant bruise. But she insisted to come to work the following day, even
if her doctor had given her a three days leave. How crazy can one get? They were
loosing their toolbars. And saying ‘View – Toolbar’’ again and again, when a Toolbar
was missing didn’t help.
Why did they all work so much. Housefoncs didn’t even need to, they couldn’t be
sacked. Once a Housefonc, always a Housefonc. They could have just said: I won’t do
this anymore. But they didn’t. They went on with it. They were not afraid to loose their job, they were afraid to loose their work. The God of work. Like Jo or Consuelo were
in person.
“Gwendoline. It’s Thelma. I have all the names of people in my document
underlined with strange little red and green waves! But there not errors, they are
names.”
“That’s because the ‘Check Spelling while you type’ is active. Choose ‘Tools - Options
- Spelling and Grammar’’ and deselect Check Spelling and Grammar as you type.”
“Great. They’re gone. But something else while I have you there: Françoise told me
there was a way to get the synonyms of a word very easily. But I’ve looked
everywhere, I can’t find out.”
“That’s the Thesaurus. Thelma, just right-click on the word and choose ‘Synonyms’!
OK?”
“Yes that’s it. How marvellous. But wait. Françoise also told me that she could see the
corrections for a misspelled word immediately by right-clicking on the word. How do I
do that?”
“Thelma... you right-click on the word...”
Thelma laughed. “What was I thinking of, truly I work too much and it makes me
stupid. I guess modern slavery kills just as much as the one which made us work in the
salt mines. No it’s probably not that bad. Thanks so much Gwendoline.”
Gwendoline wondered, not for the first time, how a woman as intelligent as Thelma
was could miss the most simple of gestures, by looking for the moon at midday.
They needed help, but from where was this help to come from? For now, it was only
chaos, and everybody was looking for someone to blame. As a joke, MOU XII people
did indeed find someone: those Seven which had come to visit them, if only briefly, but
then with bravado. But there had been no bravado in their leaving the MOU so quickly
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after coming. They bore them a grudge for leaving so soon and now everything that
went wrong (and everything that could did) was put at their fault. It was meant as a
joke but was used all the time.
“I did do nothing. The dwarfs have made my document disappear.”
‘The dwarfs have installed the Winamp on my computer, not I.” Winamp was along
Media Player a favourite music player programme.
“I did do nothing, but suddenly my icons were all over the Desktop, I’m sure some of
them even fell on the floor, and I just can’t find them anymore.”
“My network connection isn’t working anymore, I’m sure that the dwarfs were here
tonight and cut the cable.”
“My computer doesn’t work. Again. There must be a dwarf sitting in it!”
In fact that was being very unfair to the dwarfs, which were such understanding and
hardworking people, and Myra, who believed in such things, especially in dwarfs, fro
obvious reason, was afraid their feelings would get hurt, hearing all that unfair
nonsense about them, and feared that one day would come back and take revenge.
Dwarfs were very touchy and sensitive creatures and could get very annoying when
their feelings were hurt. They could be very generous too, when they met brave and
deserving humans. She hoped the dwarfs knew that those humans ‘didn’t know what
they were saying nor doing’. As she had soon noticed from the users questions and
doings. She hoped the dwarfs would take pity on them, just as she (almost) did.
But some people pushed it so far as to pretend they had actually SEEN one or more of
the dwarfs. Typically this happened at lunchtime or during the night (as people where
working even then) and when no one but themselves had been around. One user kept
talking about the dwarf she had seen with such instance, trying to convince everyone
for hours and ceaselessly nagging each person she met to be believed, that she was
driving everyone to sheer madness. This was not a joke anymore. After two weeks of
this her boss finally gave her a one month leave. That was probably what she’d aimed
at from the start. One month leave for seeing dwarfs? That was just the way of the
House. The House was sort of proud to be crazy, and people got a bonus when they
excelled in this.
And everyone tried to. People literally STROVE to get crazier with every day that came.
It’s a sport to be unhappy for some people. Penelope kept repeating that it was HER
dwarf’s fault. He was carrying everything which made sense away in her neighbour’s
wheelbarrow. But then Penelope always thought everything was her fault. Hilde and
the rest of CHD thought it could be rather Mrko Mrnsk’s fault. Again he had ignored
an enquiry they had sent them about a serious bug in the configuration. A bug is a code in a computer programme that does not work. The etymology of the term is said to
come from a real bug that had once disturbed one Harvard computer. But a bug is
serious business. Only Flavia, who was always imagining catastrophes, was able to
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imagine the consequences it could have, like explosions in pipelines, car crashes in a
computerised traffic system, wrong medicine being administrated in a hospital at the
time of an epidemic.
It’s lunchtime
Penelope and Hilde fled as soon as they could to have lunch with their usual crowd. As
soon as they could was easily said and it was 1h30 when they arrived at the Pink Bar,
where Jenny, Emma I & II and Julia were already waiting for them.
Josepha was still missing, and everyone missed her.
Of course on one side Penelope could have been happy. With ‘nothing to do’ she could
have finally fulfilled a now almost life-long dream: Get some order in her files. But she was too worried for that. So she just sat and read Email jokes to put her mind on
something else, but soon, she tired even of that. But something had to be done. Josepha
just had to be found. Or at least someone to replace her at interim.
Rumours started about secret underground alleys in the building but security denied
this. CHD knew of course they were lying, there was at least one. The one between
Koch and Curie. But maybe they didn’t even know of it.
Other black humour alleged the House Minotaur had eaten her. Some people pretended
to firmly believe there must be such an ogre prowling around.
But it was not funny. Josepha’s disappearance was a disaster. She would have been the
only plausible person to see through that mess, and get the MOU out of it. But as
always, the little ones would have to sort it out alone. And indeed what are we there
for, if not to do everything ourselves?
This is something you must understand: if you want something, just do it, don’t wait
for some foreign power to do it for you. Authorities don’t know or don’t want to know
what is needed, if you don’t tell them. And if you do, they will be as helpless as you
are. And anyway, there is no such kind of power, this is just wishful thinking. I mean
the kind of power that could have the power to put things right just like you want them
to be. In a way many people seem to know this and because of that don’t go to vote. Or
is it the other way around?
This didn’t stop people of worrying about Josepha Laperm. And the few who had
known him, to worry about Jack Owl.
Both of their close staff was so worried about how to handle the situation that it made
them blind and deaf. They called upon Hilde several times in the afternoon for absolute
nonsense. She finally broke a rather golden rule about users and chided some of them
slightly:
“May I ask you why you call me to tell me that the sound on your PC isn’t working,
but when I come by to have a look I simply click and it works? And that you call me
telling me the Search icon has disappeared from your Windows Explorer toolbar, when
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it is right before your nose? What is this mystery?”
She got no answer, and the Search function did find Josepha either.
It’s because in Search again people forget to select the ‘More Advanced Options’ and
select ‘Search for Hidden Files and Folders’ there.
And have a coffee
Leo and Gwendoline too talked about Josepha over a lait russe at the Goats Bar. Since talking didn’t make her come back they went back to their usual topics. Their
discussions were kind of philo sessions. They were short of course and couldn't
possibly last longer than ten minutes. Anyway who has said one was allowed to take
coffee breaks? Even if of course their philo talk went mostly around analysing their
work and workload, believe them, but nowadays the CHD didn't even have the time
anymore to talk about work. So Leo and Gwendoline didn’t...
Leo talked about his son Nino, that he missed them, and about his problems with his
ex-wife. Gwendoline complained of being married to a rather childish husband. But
Leo guessed that he was just a bit boring. The childish part she did like, she loved
everything small, and Leo feared she was lying to herself. Leo too was an excellent
listener; which is a dream for women in a man seldom come true.
Or a dream a user might be having about his HelpDesk. Typically Leo might not have
the solution, but would engage in a Question & Answer game, in the way a detective or a psychoanalyst would, so that many users would find the answer themselves. He never
despised any question, even if it seemed to be a unique event and in no way essential,
but he gave each of them his attention and their importance. He paid a user’s call the
respect a priest would to a confession.
One can answer many a question and solve many a problem by listening.
The cafeteria was filled to the extent of bursting with external visitors, coming from all over the world. At one end of the cafeteria they saw a huge table around which sat
people from at least seventy countries. One could have thought they were costumed.
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But they all only wore the costumes of their countries. Gwendoline and Leo could
recognise kimonos from Japan, Dirndl and Lederhosen from Bavaria, Saris from India,
long sleeved shirts and wide trousers from Vietnam, Mongolian hats, pointed for the
men and large and flat for the women, Jelabas and caftans for the Moroccans, Ponchos
from Mexico, Batik from Java, North American feathers! They could only but admire
but not give a name to costumes like Sfakia from Crete, colourful wraps called Miewaz
secured around the waist with a fold for the Yemenite men, wide and colourful Agbada
gowns for a Yoruba man, draped robes and striped shawls for a Masai.
It felt like carnival, but was a serious meeting about science founds for development
countries.
Hilde had a coffee with Maurice, but in her office.
Maurice had come with two cups, and had begun telling her about how he was
going to install disk mirroring on the MOUXII server. “So if one disk drive fails the system can instantly switch to the other disk, so no data will be lost. Service
will continue too. Users won’t yell.”
Hilde sipped her coffee, listened. She felt glad, strangely reassured, soothed.
However could users be afraid of Maurice, and his superb Chinese?
The afternoon was unusually quiet. Hilde felt it was the quiet preceding a storm. She
felt it in her bones: Tomorrow would bring a storm. A tornado? A tsunami? A
hurricane? What would it be? She liked storms and maybe difficulty.
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A Computer romance
It was four o’clock in the morning. Since she wouldn’t have been able to go back to
sleep anyway Hilde took a shower, dressed and ‘left for the House’. She would get a
coffee down at Donatello’s place, Donatello was in at four o’clock every morning, to
take delivery of the newspapers.
I believe I might have already briefly mentioned this (Ha), but one can find people in
the House at any time. During the day of course, what could be more normal, but also
at weekend or at night. Those were the moments where one could find some peace in
order to get the real work done.
Indeed the problem was that Hilde couldn’t get to work at all, because she never found
a moment of peace. With over a hundred Emails, fifty phone calls, and users as well as
colleagues popping into her office by batches of three or four simultaneously, she just
couldn’t get to work. But she did have to find the time somehow, in order to prepare
the migration plans from the old to the new programmes.
So why not now, between five and eight thirty o’clock in the morning, for even if it
was not unusual for people to be in at this time, chances were less now for a user
discovering her, and taking advantage of the situation to have her all for him or herself, assailing her with tons of questions. Hilde needed some peace, she wanted to work.
At five o’clock she entered the building. She quickly went down to the Newspaper
shop where Donatello promptly served her a coffee. His coffee, as always, was
excellent, how did he do it. It was just machine coffee too, but somehow it tasted best
at his place. Tello wished her a good day and she took the elevator, which came
promptly, she crossed her floor and reached her office. At its doorstep she stopped
slightly, because she thought to have heard light steps, tipping quickly away. Like of
mice wearing little boots. A very little user? But there was no one to be seen.
Happily she entered her office, booted her PC, logged on, and opened her Excel sheet,
in order to do the desired planning. She sighed contentedly. Silence. Silence! Silence?
Silence ... Oh no. In the corridor, she heard a light step. The typically light step of feet supporting a rather tall and thus heavy body, almost disguising a slight limp.
It was Maurice. He glowed with pleasure when she saw her, and literally plunged at
her, throwing himself without any introduction into a long lovemaking:
“Hi Hilde, I have just been installing the new NAS server...” He was so full of the
subject that he quickly lapsed into his own secret tongue, which Hilde only knew
brokenly, but then, she liked the sound of this voice:
NAS, you know, Network-attached storage is hard disk storage that is set up with its own network address rather than being attached to the department computer that is
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serving applications to a network’s workstation users. By removing storage access and its management from the department server, both application programming and files
can be served faster because they are not competing for the same processor resources.
The network-attached storage device is attached to a local area network typically, an Ethernet network) and assigned an IP address. File requests are mapped by the main
server to the ...
She loved it but inwardly she winced. Should she tell him gently to f... off because she had come in so early in order to work in peace? But she hesitated. Maurice was always
so nice and available, never loosing his nerves, letting himself be attacked gently by all his users and colleagues, answering with infinite patience. She herself had often felt
guilty about putting too much demand upon him. After all he was a powerful, but then
very nice magician. Would he get mad at her if she told him to go away, because she
really needed to work in peace?
No, she told herself, he would only be sad. She thought further. No, he wouldn’t even
be sad, he was so used to giving and not receiving much back that he wouldn’t even
really notice. She only felt a very slight sadness about his realising this. So Hilde
braced herself, told her workload to go to hell, and smiled at him with expectation for
him to go on with his story about magical RAID disks and heavenly NAS storage.
“... NAS file server. Network-attached storage consists of hard disk storage, including multi-disk RAID systems, and software for configuring and mapping file locations to
the network-attached device. Network-attached storage can be a step toward and
included as part of a more sophisticated storage system known as a storage area
network like SAN. 5 ”
He glowed with pleasure. He waved his arms around with enthousiasm, his eyes
glowed with exaltation. His voice went higher and higher and its pitch began to
resemble what was at least the ninth symphony.
He kept on talking like this for about an hour. Suddenly he stopped, rotated around
himself twice, turned around her desk and sat on the visitor chair next to her:
“Let me show you something! Well, several things. Firstly the new Remote Computer
Control Programme I have discovered on TechNet!“
He made her log on to her second PC and began downloading and installing the
programme.
“I will give it to you. This is much better then the one we have now. I think we should
get the licence for it. That is, if ITPOL lets us.”
5 http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/
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He began explaining the software’s advantages of in detail. ”You can now log on to
the user’s computer without leaving your own chair. You can enter their registry. You
can see the open sessions on their PC and intervene. We can manage our servers too.”
He sang this. It was now sounding like the ‘Te Deum De Dettingen’ by Händel at least.
When he had finished singing he went over to still another new programme:
“And I will give you a demo of how to use the policy files. You see you open them by loading a hive via the registry.”
Such he demoed, singing one love song after the other. The programmes became
beautiful wild swans, vast empty beaches filled with sun and palm trees, volcanoes and
old roman churches.
The following hour was consecrated to his excitedly downloading and installing all
sorts of useful programmes for Hilde. Have a look on http://www.Tucows.com for such
useful programmes, but this was nothing against http://www.mauricedescher.com.
“I will show you STAR topology and SUN servers and explain OASIS's
OpenDocument format and show you how to protect yourself against Malware. You
will just love it.”
Love indeed? The scene was weird in a way, because it was five o’clock and shouldn’t
they both be in bed… Exactly! Hilde began to have notions. Did he do everything so
well? Was he so giving e v e r y w h e r e? Would he be so wonderful in the place
where there both should still be, instead of being here at five o’clock in the morning
and making love with computers? She was very amused. The thought appealed to her.
Intelligent man always made her feel slightly amorous, it turned her almost on,
listening to them telling her for hours about their passion.
Hilde was a practical person but maybe that’s what the English meant when they used
the expression ‘he made love to her with words’, not having the physical meaning it
took in other countries. Maurice continued explaining new useful programmes to her.
The time went by, she lost track of it. Then it became eight-thirty, people started to
arrive and with the very first sound of the elevator Maurice jumped on his feet and
disappeared with the words:
“I will show you later how to establish a share on the NAS computer.”
He’d disappeared so quickly that he seemed to have gone up in smoke and Hilde
remained on her chair, a bit stunned, but even more amused, and somewhere deeply
touched. What exactly had he be saying all that time? How did it go?
"There was once a big, powerful computer, very beautiful, and his pretty little wife, very mighty too. They were reigning over a big park of PC's and were very, very
happy. Their only secret sorrow was .."
What? That now one understood them and that no one listened to them? But at least
Hilde listened to Maurice’s stories.
After that the usual attack began and soon it was raining users. She gave the scene one
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last thought and then forgot about it.
The whole network fell down and with it of course the Email system, but then the
ph