Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The culture of CYA makes a denial-of-service attack less risky and almost as effective as a real attack. If your goal is to terrorize people, you don't actually need to blow them up. Just get enough scary bomb squad video on their TV sets." -- RSaunders, 2007-02-23, in a comment on Bruce Schneier's blog

April Fool's Day came a little over an hour early for me.

Last night, reuturning home from visiting my mother, I stopped at an ATM downtown. When I got back into the rental car, it would not start. Plenty of fuel, plenty of battery power, nothing amiss on the guages, but it would not start. I got the ghwhrzhwhr of the starter motor punctuated by very ominous sounding !BANG!s. I popped the hood to see whether there were any clues sufficiently obvious that even I could see them, and discovered that Dodge had opted for the "black box" metaphor -- a series of plastic covers tiling the engine compartment from firewall to grille and fender-to-fender. I tried different ways of working the gas pedal. I gave up.

I called Enterprise four times -- I'm not sure what happened the first time, the second appeared to be a cell phone glitch at my end or possibly in the network, the third seemed to be a glitch in their call center equipment, and the fourth time I actually hd a conversation. Once the communications technology started behaving, things seemed to go more smoothly, and we proceeded quickly to the "I'm going to put you on hold while I contact our roadside assistance provider for that area" stage.

I was on hold for six or seven minutes, long enough to get bored and try turning the key again...

You guessed it. After fifteen minutes of fussing with it and another five minutes on the phone, the car waited until a tow was in the process of being summoned to decide to start after all, roughly halfway through the time I was on hold. The Enterprise person came back on the line to tell me she had AAA on another line, and I got to say the car finally started on its own after twenty minutes of glitchitude.

*mutter* *grumble*

I wonder what my body's rate of hair growth is in grams/day.

But no, my curiosity is not quite strong enough to impel me to perform the obvious experiment.