First up is Murphy

who is very well known in politics, the military, engineering, and, of course, computing.
- "Murphy was an optimist."--a former Mrs. Murphy.
- It only appears to work now; it's still in the process of going wrong.
- The law of small scale software development: There's always one more bug.
- The law of large scale software development: We can make a statistical estimate within one or two orders of magnitude for how many bugs there are...this morning. Don't even ask about this afternoon.
- Oh, it's a government website. That's easy. The number of bugs and obscure interface quirks is directly proportional to the cost of developing it. (The latter of course is directly proportional to the number of dummy corporate sub-contractor cut-outs the original multi-million contract's winning bidder can insert between himself and the twelve-year-old niece he's hired through the last one to do the actual coding for baby sitter pay.
- A corporate or banking site? Then it's directly proportional to its age. Nobody maintains those to keep them current with modern browsers.
- Problems with the code base for a corporation's signature product? "None of the developers who coded it work here any more, and they didn't document what they did, why they did it, or how. We actually have no clue how it actually does work, let alone how it was supposed to work."
- The laws of hardware design: [1] (Apple): "Think just different enough to copy better." [2] (Non-Apple) "Don't think at all, just copy Apple and MS but on the dirt cheap. So what if we get sued when it doesn't work; we won't be around in a year anyway. We'll be with the government sub-contractors in a sunny clime living off the proceeds."
- Reprise: The hardware component that fries itself most often will be the least accessible, most expensive to buy, have the longest order backlog, and be soldered on.
- (Heard recently from an trusted but (here) anonymous source concerning the interface for a major integrator's product that he was having difficulties using.) Planning stage: "Use our 2.0 version". After encountering major bugs and a lengthy outage on the vendor's site: "Actually that version is obsolete now. Use version 1.0". When even more problems developed: "You should be using our most recent release, version 0.1".
- "Murph? Faith and begorrah, 'course I remember him--a total ne're-do well and loser, couldn't hold down a job, drank too much, gambled away everything he owned, went to the other place with lung cancer from smokin' overly. Started a boatload of projects, careers, jobs, relationships, an' three marriages. Abandoned ever' one, blamed his failures on bad luck, the boss, the other guy, his ladies, the hardware, the software, the bottle, day o' the week, the wind blowing from the East on a Thursday, always something unexpected messing up his plans, an' not his fault. You know the type--a complainer, shirker, the quintessential loser."

The laws of unintended consequences.

tend to make good old Murph look comparatively good. So, riffing on the above...
- What the users' boss (name of Dilbert, don't yuh know) says: "It's just what I asked for but not what anyone here wanted."
- What the users' themselves say (while throwing darts at pages of the manual they've tacked to the wall: [1] "It used to take four clicks to get the the menu we use the most. Now it takes twelve." [2] "Nobody asked us before computerizing our bad system. When they first did, most things went horribly terribly wrong in seconds rather than taking weeks. After revision two it all flies to pieces in nanoseconds."
- for Gamblers trying yet another "can't fail to pay off big time" bet: The house always wins. Gamble long and hard enough and you're guaranteed to lose everything. Online or in person is all the same.
- for fellow alcoholics wanting just one more drink: "Drink long enough and heavily enough and you will eventually die of alcohol poisoning. Since you had by that time alienated both family and friends, your body won't be discovered until someone complains of the smell."
- then there was the recent announcement by the Canadian government that wants to outlaw weapons of mass killings by requiring owners of various models of guns to turn them in--"potentially not a bad idea" bethinks the Spy "mayhap fewer kids and teachers killed at school". After all what legitimate use does an automatic assault rifle have in the hands of a private citizen? Oops, better not opine that on the other side of what used to be the longest undefended border in human history. Failure to hew big time the big boss' line down there and you could end up in prison for disagreeing. OTOH, how many guns are Canada's feds likely to get, especially when the sender has to pay the postage, and the Crown Corporation Post Office doesn't want to handle them? On the gripping hand (apologies to the late JP) then the other shoe dropped, as our fearless leader announced he would send the weapons turned in to Ukraine for their outgunned fight against Putin (a.k.a. Vladimir the terrible, the terminator, etc). Excuse me? Some of the weapons now supposedly prohibited are 22 calibre. You might as well send a soldier a popgun. In a war, they'd be weapons of mass self-destruction. Anyway, have they received more than two so far? Oops.
- for someone who claims citizens of a neighbouring allied country want to change nationalities and join them: The greedy government's national anthem now gets robustly booed when one of their teams plays in the targeted country. The now fastest-selling merchandise is a MAGA-style hat reading "Canada is not for sale" Meanwhile Canadian's now sing their own with more pride, patriatism, and gusto than in decades. Willing always to remain good neighbours, but not neighbors. Operating at the centre of great relations, never at the center of a takeover. Always measuring allies by the metre, never by the yard, nor even by the meter.
- for someone instituting trade wars with tariffs: Since a tariff is a tax on purchasers in the country imposing it, yes, it might reduce imports. It also causes massive price increases, and therefore fuels inflation, unfriends former allies, tends to lower the value of the targeted nations' currencies, making their goods cheaper to export, thus cancelling a portion of the extra tax burden. The former good trading partners now look elsewhere for honest and reliable trade alliances. They also retaliate, reducing the tariffing nation's own exports and costing jobs in its country--creating the classic lose-lose scenario. Oh, yes, and the last time trade wars erupted on a global scale, the unintended consequence was called the Great Depression and saw the near destruction of the entire world economy. (Parenthetical fact checks: [1] In goods and services the United States has the trade advantage, not Canada. Only when energy is added to the mix does it swing the other way. [2] If energy imports were curtailed or cut off, numerous U.S. based refineries would need to spend billions to re-tool in order to process American crude (not enough of it at the moment)--it ain't the same as the Canadian stuff. "Drill, baby, drill" cannot change anything overnight. That would take longer than an entire presidential term.)
- The Spy has to use the CRA (our version of the IRS) website to do tax slips for Church employees. The site persists on defaulting to the person entering the information as the employer. It has to be changed manually every time it is used. And, because that information is populated to, though not directly entered on the employee record, if not noticed, it cannot subsequently be fixed unless a change is made to the employee slip. Presumably this unintended consequence rule was supposed to be a safety feature rather than an error manufactury.
- He also has to use the BC Central Credit Union site for payroll and other transactions. The site is so out of date and has such an opaque and non-intuitive user interface that the poor suckers entering data have to rely on previous misadventures and guesswork to do anything. The main page has only two items in its menu, and one is non-operative as the Spy is not signed on with "Member status", whatever that means. Doing anything requires navigating such an incomprehensible maze of menus that one needs to write one's own private manual to remember where to go. For instance, a payment made to someone else is called a "credit" and money coming in is called a "debit". Of course the meanings of those words depend on one's point of view, but to make that the perspective of the other party rather than of the site user seems brokenly non-intuitive to the Spy. Finally, when his password expired and had to be changed, his password manager correctly erased the old and rang in the new, instantly propagating the change to all his devices, but the site failed to make the change. Repeated attempts with the new password triggered error messages, and his old password could not initially be found. An intrepid search through old backups finally located a copy, but the site stubbornly refused do anything when he put in the change password data. Undaunted, he abandoned the task with Safari and tried Chrome. No joy. Finally, he dug out an ancient (4-year-old) version of FireFox. There, it worked. Old password accepted, new password accepted, and happy, happy. In conversation with a customer rep a few days later, he was apprised that there was a known cache bug, and the fix for now was to empty the cache before attempting a password reset. Even the Spy would not likely thought of that. Hey he's only been working with calculating or computing machines since 1966, teaching computing science since 1978, and keeping a set of books since he was six, and was getting a penny a day allowance, (compulsive behaviour, yes, he realizes?) so what could he know about computers performing accounting tasks?
- And then there are the (mis)adventures of delivery services. My late father-in-law told an ongoing story of the post office where he worked for many years: "Hey Fred, this one's marked 'fragile'. Catch," and the playful sorter employee tossed a package across the crowded room. What follows is, however, the Spy's own recent experience with a comedy of woeful errors.

A tale of two (three?) tracking numbers

is one for the detective, but not the faint of heart, though it does include some feint of delivery.

Last month's adventure (the best of times, the worst of times) with his newly published text of ethical and social issues in technology adoption and use involved his excruciatingly bad experiences trying to tame Adobe Acrobat to edit his MS to publisher's specs. Well, his new publisher Wipf and Stock finally launched the now official fifth edition, and were to send him complementary copies of both volumes of his near-1000 page tome. So, the Spy ordered and paid for a couple of extra copies of each in early December--all to be printed (on demand of course--every publisher does it that way) and shipped to his office at the university. A side comment: a novel of comparable size to one of those volume retails for about $20, the text is $105 per volume.

When by late January nothing had arrived, he contacted a publisher rep to enquire why not. She wrote back with two tracking numbers and an initial interpretation of their data, namely that both had apparently indeed been delivered by Purolator on January second and sixth, some three weeks earlier. Data is of course not information until properly interpreted, so the py was optimistic and pessimistic at the same time.

Wondering why the bookstore (runs the shipping and receiving department) hadn't delivered said books to his building, he sauntered over there, not without some trepidation, because his ten novels, once displayed with other TWU authors' books had vanished from the bookstore shelves except for two titles incorrectly shelved out of alphabetical order in the textbook section. Inventory said they had others, but no one knew where. On arriving he discovered that a new re-shelving had made the last surviving ones also vanish into thin air (not a good start for the venture). Had they perhaps received the books and put them in their own inventory? Alas, their answer on checking the receiving records for the Purolater: "We have no record of this delivery."

Somewhat baffled over the contrarian accounts of (yes/no/maybe/I don't know) re delivery, he returned to his ivory basement office to carefully ponder and attempt to decipher the rather opaque Purolator tracking records. After two sessions with this and a preliminary report back to the shipper, he managed to deduce from the cryptic material (he cannot bring himself to call it "information") the following trail of bread (or book) crumbs.

The tracking links provided him by the publisher both reference parcels sent via Purolator from Langley (i.e. from their facility here) to Etobicoke, Ontario, rather than to anything delivered to the university. However, a previous tracking number referenced in one corner of that history refers to a package originating in Memphis TN, sent via Etobicoke, Ontario to Langley BC, then to our closest Purolator facility in neighbouring Port Kells. An attempted delivery on December 24 was annotated with the shocking comment that the recipient was on vacation (duh), whence it was described next as "Address Correction Required" then "Duplicate label issue" then as "undeliverable," marked "return to sender," split into two parcels with the new tracking numbers obtained from the publisher, with both having indeed been delivered four days apart back to the Etobicoke facility they had traversed on the way here. The status of those tracking numbers was now "Estimated delivery date: not available".

There is nothing to indicate that a second delivery attempt here was ever made. Sometimes new drivers are not properly instructed by their trainer/supervisor, or do not understand or remember their instructions, and I notice them driving aimlessly around campus looking for the building on the shipping label, when they are all supposed to be told to take everything to the central shipping and receiving dock, a spot where trucks come and go in never-ending procession all day long.

In any event, once it arrived in Toronto suburb Etobicoke, it is possible no one there realized they had replaced the original tracking number with others for shipment within Canada (even though their data does reference it), and therefore do not know what to do with the now two packages because the data nominally shows the Toronto suburb as the sender to whom to return undeliverables (check your own tracking data to find the true origin and destination why not?). Anyway, the Spy finally sent all this info to Purolator with the suggestion they route both back here where they belong, bring it to the shipping and receiving dock on a business day when someone would be there, so they can in return cart them over to the Spy's mailroom in the Science building.

Meanwhile, the publisher, when apprised of the Purolator three-ring circus, ordered a fresh lot printed and sent to the Spy by expedited shipping, and told him he could keep the first lot if it ever arrived. Hey, low probability, but possible. Then again, by this time, the books could be quite battered.

The bottom line after significant detective work in a very opaque and confusing system: At every conceivable critical point of possible failure, lack of clear information and proper training in the use of a poorly designed and run system virtually guaranteed everything that could go wrong was certain to do so.

Of course it is also possible that the tracking information means something completely different, as it does not mention the addressee (though Purolator now has a copy of the actual original shipping label for their amusement.) Perhaps his books went to Russia, China, Argentina, South Africa, or a galaxy far, far away. When he returns to the office tomorrow (snowed in with about 35 cm at the moment and teaching classes via Zoom) perhaps there will be two or three parcels waiting there-some rather knocked about by a long and unsatisfactory journey though the maze created by an inadequately designed and documented system. Perhaps even the new shipment won't make it past the points of failure. Perhaps the (now) three packages will arrive damaged, this time back in Memphis after a driver either attempts delivery at midnight, or got lost driving aimlessly around campus trying to find a building (s)he already drove past a few times instead of stopping at shipping and receiving, which (s)he also drove past to become lost. This was just the trailer. Stay tuned for the exciting second episode. Perhaps it will become an entire entertaining season. No romantic sub-plot seems apparent though.

Well, children, story time is over for this month. In closing, he's reminded that once, long, long, ago, the Spy spun a yarn that included ten puns, thinking some might move his hearers to laughter at his harmless inanities. Sadly, no pun in ten did.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is Professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-fourth year as a high school and university teacher in 2024. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several commercial and/or educational organizations and participated in developing industry standards both nationally and internationally. He is a long-time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (both dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 and cancer happened, so he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth has been released; site to be re-ded=signed real soon now) : https://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html

URL s for one product mentioned this month:

Wipf&Stock site for the 4Civ book Volume One: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385226818/the-fourth-civilization-volume-one/

Wipf&Stock site for the 4Civ book Volume Two: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385232932/the-fourth-civilization-volume-two/