[Leica] I am so stupid I can't believe it!

[Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>]

Most of you know that there has been something wrong with the Leica
Users archives for several weeks, since the middle of September. Some of
you know that I've tried for weeks to find and fix the problem.

Just now I have found the problem, and fixed it, and I am slowly
restoring the archives. I can't entirely decide whether this episode is
because I am stupid, or because God is punishing me for something cruel
that I did in 1968.

Let me first tell you what I did in 1968 that makes me fear Divine
retribution, and then I will tell you what the problem was.

I went to the University of Maryland. I lived in a dormitory called
Cambridge A. That was the men's honors dorm. Across the quad from us was
Bel Air B, the football player's dorm. During the spring semester of
1968 the men in the football player's dorm brutally harassed the
eyeglass-wearing scholars in the honors dorm. And this being a state
university in the era when the football coach ran the university, we had
no resource save to put up with it or to solve the problem ourselves.

I took charge of the "solve the problem ourselves" venture, and for one
week we made their lives miserable. We waited until the week of midterm
exams, figuring that the easiest way to hurt a football player was to
get them declared ineligible by the NCAA, and that flunking midterms
would be a good way to do that. Every night, mysteriously, their dorm
lost power. Their water supply kept getting turned off, so they couldn't
shower. Their phones stopped working. Their radios were somehow
mysteriously jammed. Bizarre smells permeated their building. 

After three days the university physical-plant people figured out how we
were turning off their water every night, and they welded the manhole
shut. So  instead of turning off the water to the building, we went into
the building in the middle of the night and turned off, individually,
every plumbing fixture. We turned off every sink, every toilet, every
shower, every drinking fountain. Anything that was supposed to have
water was turned off.

Naturally, after 3 days of us turning off the water main and the
university turning it back on again, they were programmed to look for
some sort of a water-main shutoff. It took them 5 days to discover that
there was nothing wrong with the main, but that every single fixture was
independently turned off.

What on earth does this college prank of 34 years ago have to do with
Leica Users? Well, it turns out that the reason I haven't been able to
fix the archive problem is that there's nothing wrong with the archive.
The archive mechanism is working perfectly. It's just that every message
was being individually deleted before reaching the archive mechanism. 

For the entire time that the Leica Users archive has existed, messages
that contain the word "unsubscribe" have not been added to the archives,
because in the past, such messages have been misdirected requests to
unsubscribe, and I wanted neither to clutter the archives with them nor
file away the evidence that someone couldn't follow instructions.

Sometime in the middle of September, in order to be helpful and
"clarify" things, I caused this line to be added to the end of every
Leica-Users message. Notice its second word:


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