Ted is a new discount air carrier that’s owned by United. I went to their website to see if they service Minneapolis. They don’t. So, since they’re new, I wondered if they have plans to expand here. I wrote their customer service the following simple, straightforward email:
“Message: Is Ted coming to Minneapolis anytime soon? Thanks!
Sam”
The following was their response. Raise your hand if you are wondering why United is going bankrupt?
“Dear Sam,
Thank you for contacting us. You ask about our route structures and schedules. Basically, this is what happens. Domestic and international route structure teams regularly analyze scheduling commitments with these questions in mind: Are we using prime resources effectively? Are airplanes and flight crews working in the most cost-effective and efficient manner possible? If the route structure and scheduling teams determine that revised schedules provide greater opportunities for airplanes, crews, and United’s route structure, they make the required changes. For our customers’ benefit, United needs to work efficiently and cost -effectively, and remain competitive as well. We appreciate this opportunity to be of assistance and look forward to serving you.
Best regards, Nancy Castro Customer Relations”
Bunch of wack-mobiles.
— Sammy G
Planes
Ever since my last plane trip, where because I had a one-way ticket, I had a violating and extended examination by security personnel, I’ll be looking for alternatives to flying anywhere on domestic shores. That was a funny response she gave you, though. Clueless, but funny.
Thinking along the lines of “what were they thinking” (but otherwise unrelated to this), I had an interesting experience this morning. Yesterday I’d left my laptop with our Windows IT guy, figuring that since he’d had more experience with Windows XP (I’m mostly a UNIX person, Windows is for games and email only), he could diagnose an odd problem I was having with the box.
Well, I got in this morning, and he told me, “Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, you disabled the virus-scanning agent, and you got infected with a Linux worm.”
Me: <boggle> … “Umm, you mean I got a Windows virus named with Linux somewhere in the name?” I asked.
Him: “No, it’s the Linux Hijacker worm. It’s a Linux and Windows cross-platform virus. Mack” (My supervisor there) “was looking into it. I don’t know much about it. It said the virus was in c:\windows\system32\etc\ and then some German path name. But we couldn’t get into the directory — we couldn’t even see it or delete it. And every time I’ve tried to make a boot disk to repair it this morning, the boot disk crashes. It looks to be a bad one.”
Me: “Huh. OK.” I have a very sensitive “bullcrap-meter” in my head, and it was jangling loudly, right behind my eyeballs. If I ignore it too long, it gives me a headache.
I’d remembered that the Linux Hijacker was a worm that attacked old Redhat versions. I was running Gentoo on my Linux partition, and I had not heard of some combined Linux/Windows virus lately. His description sounded somewhere between wild-ass guess and Timbuktu.
He was running a DOS-based antivirus program. I swapped out the floppies for him as it repeatedly scanned the disk and found nothing.
Me: “You mind if I take my notebook back to my desk now and do some additional research on this… <ahem> virus?”
Him: “I’d really rather you didn’t plug it into the network.”
Me: “It’s OK. I won’t plug it into the network until I figure out what’s up.”
The IT guy didn’t look happy, but I took it anyway. He was distracted enough by other problems, and unsure and vague enough about my problem that I no longer felt confident leaving the computer with him.
So I did research. I confirmed my suspicion that “Linux Hijacker” was an ancient Linux virus. Eventually, “Mack” came in, and I asked him what was up, as I ran a GUI version of the same virus scanner that failed to find anything earlier. I really respect Mack’s abilities and intuition, but something still felt strange about this “virus”.
Mack: “Oh, no, we thought maybe it was spyware that was causing your networking problems, so we ran Spybot. It found a hidden directory your c:\windows\system32\etc\ directory.” (he runs the utility, and up pops the message) “Yeah, there, that directory doesn’t exist. It’s some funny German directory name.”
I read the line in question. It said “c:\windows\sytem32\drivers\etc\hosts: unable to read file: Access denied.”
Of course, that last part was in German
I read German.
“Mack, that’s an error message. It is saying it can’t read my hosts file. It appears I had left the file open in my cygwin ‘vi’ editor when I rebooted at some point, and it left the file’s permissions in a funny state.” I did a “chmod 777” to the file. Re-ran the spyware utility. It found nothing wrong.
Mack: “You speak German?”
Me: “Yeah”. Not entirely true — I can read German reasonably well, but I haven’t attempted to speak it in a decade.
I went through the motions of checking for a “virus” causing the network problems with my box as Mack returned to his office. Of course, it found nothing — I’m extremely anal about security on my box, and don’t trust virus scanners (which is why I had mine turned off). After about two more hours of research, I discovered the reason I couldn’t ping or rdesktop to my box was that I had the “stateful firewall” function of my Cisco VPN client turned on. I don’t remember turning it on, but we went through three versions of the VPN client trying to find one that wouldn’t crash the PIX in our production environment.
Since “stupid things” seem to be the topic of the day, I figured I’d put up that story. It’s a tendency that concerns me in IT: many times, IT practitioners make wild guesses as to what a problem is, wasting inordinate amounts of time chasing down strange paths because we simply don’t know what’s gone wrong. And yet, something as simple as checking a German dictionary can tell us it’s an easy problem to get a handle on.
Even as I sit here, feeling self-satisfied having solved the problem after three co-workers banged their heads against it for quite some time yesterday, I can’t help but wonder if I could have been the wild guesser if I didn’t know a little bit of the German language.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Deutch
Ich mag Torte
Mmmm….
Mmmm torte….