Before being bought, SuperMac would routinely and randomly record a certain number of technical support calls, to keep tabs on customer satisfaction. By wild ‘luck,’ they managed to catch the following conversation on tape.

On a day like any other, a SuperMac technical support representative got a call from some middle level official from the government of Trinidad. The fellow spoke English very well and calmly described the problem.

It seemed there was a coup attempt in progress at that moment. The national armory for the city, however, was kept in the same building as the Legislature—and there was a combination lock on the door to the armory. Of the people in the capitol city that day, only the Chief of the Capitol Guard and the Chief Armorer knew the combination to the lock, and they had already been killed.

The officer of the government of Trinidad began to describe the problem. The combination to the lock was stored in a file on a Macintosh—but the file had been encrypted with the SuperMac security product called Sentinel. “Is there any chance” the beleaguered official asked, “...that there is a ‘back door’ to the application, so that we can get the combination, open the armory door and defend the Capitol Building and the legitimately elected government of Trinidad against the insurgents?”

All the while, throughout the official’s calm inquiries, there is the sound of gunfire in the background. The SuperMac support representative put the Trinidad official on hold. A phone call to the phone company verified that the origin of the call was, in fact, Trinidad.  Meanwhile, there was this mad scramble to see if anybody knew of any ‘back doors’ in Super Mac’s Sentinel program.

As it turned out, Sentinel uses DES to encrypt the files, and there was no known back door. The tech representative reluctantly confessed to the customer that, aside from trying to guess the password, there was no way through Sentinel—and that they’d be better off trying to physically destroy the lock.

The official was very polite, thanked the SuperMac technician for the effort, and hung up. That night, the legitimate government of Trinidad fell. One of the BBC reporters mentioned that the casualties seemed heaviest in the capitol, where for some reason, there seemed to be little return fire from the government forces.

Perhaps they should have known better than to keep the lock combination in so precarious a fashion. But it does place “My application unexpectedly quit” complaints in a different sort of perspective, does it not?

 
CALLER:  “A friend of mine gave me your software, and I'd like to order the
                 manuals...”

                                                                                       Tech Support Tales compiled by 

Eric Hausmann is a Macintosh Technician and Co-Sysop for two Florida BBSes. He welcomes commentary and submissions at Junkspill@aol.com.