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

["dante@umich.edu" <dante@umich.edu>]

No big loss, since so much was OT...

on 10/4/01 2:26 PM, Brian Reid at reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us 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

- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html