112 Computer

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O ne fairly persistent aspect ofThe Profession has been anunderstandably natural seri-ousness when the focus is on matters technical and pro-

fessional.Perhaps being serious so much of the

time is a mistake. When Computerpublished Simone Santini’s delightfulessay, “We are sorry to inform you …”,(Dec. 2005, pp. 128, 126-127), theearly e-mail from readers congratulatedhim on having unearthed these impor-tant reviews. Maybe they were pullinghis leg, and if so, then obviously theygreatly appreciated his humor. A latere-mail more pointedly commented onthe improvement a bit of humor madeto the column.

A temporary substitution of style,some leaven of levity, seems worth try-ing again, so let’s have a fairy tale.

Fairy tales are works of extreme fic-tion, but there will be a moral.

THE FARMEROnce upon a time there was a boy

called Oldham who lived on a dairyfarm, milking cows, feeding pigs,

breeding ferrets, catching rabbits, rid-ing horses, collecting eggs, cuttingbracken, pitchforking hay, avoidingsnakes, and wandering around thehills with a dog at his heels. However,the lure of the big city was too much.Nothing much ever happened in thecountryside, while the city seemeddense with people and events.

So Oldham went to school in the bigcity, leaving the grass for the asphalt,and eventually became a computingprofessional. But he remained a farmerat heart, or at least a country boy.

When the time came for him toretire, the call of the hills and the trees sounded loudly. He took a jobteaching about computers in a smallprovincial city. To be among the hills,trees, and birds, Oldham and his wifechose to live in the countryside, only20 minutes away by car from histeaching job.

THE GODSLiving once again in the countryside

seemed quite wonderful, except forone or two problems. The mail deliv-ery, for example.

Oldham’s house sat a little wayfrom the roadside letter box, so when-ever a registered letter or some otherspecial item arrived, the mail elfwould leave a card in the mailbox.This had to be taken to a mail grotto,not in the city but a half-hour drive inthe opposite direction. Being of a pro-fessional mind, Oldham promptlysolved this problem by renting a mailgrotto private box near his workplace.But this was only a minor irk, and lifewent on serenely.

After a few years, the gods in farValhalla began making decisions thatwould greatly affect ordinary life in thebackblocks. They had grown tired oflooking after the world outsideValhalla and rather liked the idea that,if they stopped exerting control overwhat went on, economic processeswould ensure by themselves that thebest of all possible worlds came about.So, among other similar measures, thegods decided to split the MessageMinistry between the elves who lookedafter the mail and the fairies wholooked after the telephone system.

Most people considered mail tech-nologically dull and financially unat-tractive, so the elves were simply splitoff without any expectation theywould flourish. On the other hand,the fairies’ telephone system monop-oly, coupled with the expectedbonanza from digital networking andmobile telephony, looked promising.But there were protests, so the godsinvited fauns from distant parts tocompete with the fairies and stopthem from exploiting their wired tele-phone system monopoly.

Oldham and his wife didn’t under-stand how the fauns could competewith the fairies when the fairiesowned all the wires. But, being toldthey could opt to get their long-dis-tance calls from the fauns in somemysterious way, they decided to do so.The strange thing was that, whereasthere seemed to be plenty of fairiesaround the Oldhams’ region, thefauns all were located far away. Sothey got the gnomes who looked aftertheir money to have their computer

The Farmer, the Fairies, and the ComputersNeville Holmes, University of Tasmania

Fiction is sometimes stranger than truth.Well, different anyway.

Continued on page 110

110 Computer

T H E P R O F E S S I O N

automatically pay the monthly faunbills for them.

THE FAIRIESTime passed, the Oldhams grew

older, and so did their car. Fearful thattheir car would break down when oneof them drove it to or from theirnearby city, or that one of them wouldbecome ill when the other wasn’thome, they became attracted to theidea of having mobile phones.

The nearby city had a sprites’ grottowhere mobile telephones and otherelectronic devices were sold, andwhere the Oldhams’ had made friendswith one of the sprites.

When they went to the grotto to buytheir mobile telephones, the Oldhamsbecame quite bewildered. In the firstplace, there were not only two differ-ent basic technologies to choosebetween, but also a multitude of dif-ferent mobile telephone brands andmodels. They overcame this difficultymerely by taking the advice of thefriendly sprite who was looking afterthem. But then they faced a multitudeof plans and options from varioussuppliers of mobile-telephone com-munication services.

Despairing of understanding the dif-ferences enough to make a rationalchoice, the Oldhams asked if the fairiescould simply supply the services andadd the charges to the Oldhams’monthly landline telephone bill. Yes,the sprite told them, the fairies did havea computerized Amalgamated AccountScheme, but the sprites could notarrange for the Oldhams to use it, sothey would have to take one of theother plans temporarily.

The Oldhams liked the AAS’s sim-plicity and were told they would haveto ring up the fairies and arrange itwhen they got home. The good newswas that they would get a large creditto their account from the fairies foreach mobile phone when they shiftedfrom the other plan.

Unfortunately, it took several daysto get through to the fairies becausethey had a computer answering theirown telephones. Then it took severaldays more before the Oldhams found

enough patience to get through thesequence of queues. Successful at last,they tried to use their mobile phones.

Unhappily, the several days’ delayhad dimmed their recollection of thedemonstration the sprite had giventhem. For what seemed to be good rea-sons at the time, they had chosen dif-ferent brands. This meant that they hadtwo different manuals, neither of whichwas much help. Although the wordswere English, the sentences weren’t.

The phones were both made bysatyrs living in distant lands, so theOldhams inferred that the satyrs hadwritten the manuals in their own lan-guage and used a computer to trans-late them into English. After muchexperimenting, the Oldhams wereable to actually make and answerphone calls, but the many other fea-tures remained a mystery.

THE COMPUTERSWhen the monthly bill from the

fairies’ computers came, there wasonly one of the two credits theOldhams expected. That was whenthe trouble started.

Ringing up the fairies proved fruit-less. Getting to an operator whoentered all the account details into hiscomputer only led to the slightly sur-prised remark that it was an AASaccount so he would have to switchOldham to another operator. Unfor-tunately, the queue for the AAS han-dler seemed to be indefinitely long forseveral days running, so Oldhameventually drove into town, where thefairies also had a grotto.

The grotto had lots of pleasant help-ful fairies and a row of computershooked up to their network. A ratherlengthy interaction between the com-

puter and one of the fairies led toOldham being told that the missingcredit would appear on the nextaccount.

Probably it was only a coincidence,but the following day, a fairy namedDagobert rang up the Oldhams toassure them that the fairies’ computerhad recorded their complaint abouttheir service being cut off and that he was about to come out and lookinto the problem.

Oldham assured the fairy that nocomplaint had been made and thattheir talking on the phone was primafacie evidence that the service was still connected. Although Dagobertseemed to accept this, apparently thecomputer wouldn’t, as there was asuccession of calls from increasinglysenior fairies until it was discoveredthat new people moving into a neigh-boring house had given the fairies’computer the Oldhams’ residentialaddress as theirs.

There were two strange conse-quences at the end of the month. First,there was a minatory letter from thefauns’ computer complaining thattheir bill had not been paid. Severalphone calls later, the gnomes whowere supposed to be paying these billsrevealed that the authority for themto pay had been cancelled—by whomthey could not say. Their computerheld no details. Second, and it seemedsignificantly related to the first, twoseparate bills turned up from thefairies’ computer. The first bill camethrough the private box and was forthe very few mobile phone calls theOldhams had made, mostly for prac-tice. The second bill was for the land-line calls and turned up in the roadsideletterbox mixed up with the ruralnewsheets and the junk mail.

The phone proving fruitless again,Oldham went into town, where a veryhelpful fairy, though greatly puzzled byhis tale, tracked various things downon the computer, asked numerousquestions, and eventually announcedthat he had cleared up the matter.

Sadly, next month’s bills repeated the preceding month’s story. Also, thegnomes had to be asked again to

A lengthy interaction led to Oldham being

told the missing creditwould appear on the next account.

Continued from page 112

February 2006 111

When they returned from their trip,the Oldhams discovered that theirmobile phone services had been auto-matically renewed by the fairies’ com-puter, despite a complete absence ofany device use, and that the gnomes’computer had been just as regularlypaying up.

Being rather annoyed by this,Oldham went back to town, con-fronted the fairies, and told them(truthfully) that not only had he andhis wife not been using their mobilephones, but (untruthfully) that theyhad thrown both the devices awayand (truthfully) they didn’t intend tobuy replacements.

The fairies, quite a few of whom hadgathered around to try to placateOldham, were quite understanding,and one went to the computer and suc-cessfully arranged a refund, althoughthis also took a few phone calls to getthe required high-level authorization.

resume paying the fauns. Back in town,another helpful fairy could find notrace of the previous month’s negotia-tions on their main computer, butassured Oldham that the changeswould stick this time. And they did,although the gnomes had to be autho-rized again.

HAPPILY EVER AFTERA few months later, the Oldhams

prepared to leave for a long trip, sofirst they visited the fairies in town.Asking for their mobile phone servicesto be stopped while they were away,they were told that a hefty cancella-tion fee meant that it would becheaper for them just to let the agree-ment run out. As they wished to keeptheir landline, or, more particularly,the phone number that went with it,the Oldhams arranged for the gnomesto also pay their monthly bills fromthe fairies’ computer automatically.

The Oldhams have ever since livedquite happily without mobile phones,although they do make sure their caris regularly maintained. They haveeven started to rather enjoy getting a notice in their roadside letter boxevery month from the fairies’ com-puter telling them that their accountis one cent in credit. You see, inflationhas long ago caused their gods to stopissuing one- and two-cent coins.

T he moral? Don’t expect under-standing from a computer. Trythe fairies instead. �

Neville Holmes is an honorary researchassociate at the University of Tasmania’sSchool of Computing. Contact him atneville.holmes@utas.edu.au. Details ofcitations in this essay, and links to fur-ther material, are at www.comp.utas.edu.au/users/nholmes/prfsn.

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