This is the tale of a man whose bad karma made the computers attack him.
Computers run most of America and do a better job that we ever did. Even their mistakes are better. A digit moves and your seventy dollar cable bill grows to seven hundred dollars, or your services are cut off for no reason, or you start getting lots of mail offering you credit even though your credit rating is somewhere south of the equator.
John, not his real name but my friend insists that this is a true story, worked at a natural gas company. He was high up in the management food chain, but his people skills reminded one of an elephant. He stepped on people and didn’t even notice the damage.
One summer of a group of middle managers at John’s company were taking a class on the new computer system. The new system controlled everything in the company. As software goes it was a real Swiss Army knife. The IT department took the accounts of some employees, scrubbed the financial data, and made a dummy database for use in training. Since they were using employees, no privacy rules were violated.
The people in that room hated John. They gave him a bad credit rating, created poor payment records, turned off his gas for non-payment, and moved him to the worst parts of town. All this was done as practice for handling real world situations.
They were much kinder to themselves. They presented each other with high credit ratings, excellent bill paying history, massive credit balances, and strong product usage so they would get preferential treatment. It was all in fun.
The fun stopped one cold January night when they converted all the records from the old program and fed them into the new one and then slapped that sucker on line. Somehow, the training database got mixed up with the real one. Within days, John’s life went to hell. On the coldest day of the year, the computers ordered that John’s gas be turned off and that he will never be allowed to have gas heat again in this lifetime.
When John called the customer service department in India they refused to believe that he wasn’t the most despicable customer in the entire company, if not the world. John had no heat, no hot water, no gas fired logs, and the power had just gone out in an ice storm. The only source of heat in the house was John and he was livid.
John was screaming at the people at headquarters. Someone high up made a call to someone equally exalted and a service team was dispatched with over-time to turn on the gas in the dead of night.
The next day, the computer ordered his gas turned off again and the meek, unquestioning, low paid contractors who did turn-offs complied. This time John called the head of customer care and again his gas was turned on, but that was quickly corrected by the computer the next day.
A geek team was called in and they destroyed all record that John was ever a customer of any gas company at anytime and then they created him a solid gold VIP account of the type reserved for the President of the United States.
If this had been John’s across the street neighbor with these problems, that guy would have been reduced to busting up the furniture and burning it while waiting for spring to arrive.
One of the training class middle managers was friendly with the geeks and moved quickly to get them to cover the tracks so that John would never find out who did him in. This guy didn’t have to buy lunch for months as each manager in turn took turns paying him off for his quick action.
They could afford lunch because they had not paid a gas bill in months due to their huge credit balances. Karma is a wonderful thing.
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Dammit…funny stuff you do. Please keep it up. I actually audibly laughed.