Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/10/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]GREAT story, Brian! Lea Brian Reid wrote: > 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: > > -- > To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html - -- Lea Murphy Whiny Dog Press 816-333-9111 Home: http://www.whinydogpress.com Newest: http://www.whinydogpress.com/new.html - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html