Collage 031               H u m o u r N e t                    1995

Welcome to Collage 31--with many many thanks to Nancy for the
contents.

Watch those autodialers ...

- Vince Sabio
  HumourNet Moderator
  HumourNet@telephonet.com
____________________________________________________________________
          Opener (above) Copyright 1995 by Vincent Sabio
  Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage";
  please observe the guidelines stated at the end of the message.
____________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Dial M For Mother
from Reuters news report, July 2, 1994, as reported in the RISKS
digest.

WIRES CROSS AS LOVERS DIAL M FOR MOTHER

LONDON, July 2 (Reuter)--A terrified British mother put police on
red alert after mistaking the sound of lovemaking for a cry for help
from her daughter.  The Independent newspaper said on [July 2] that
two accidental phone calls woke the woman in Devizes, southern
England, in the small hours of the morning.  Hearing moaning,
groaning and shouting, she dismissed the first as an obscene call,
but in the second she recognised her daughter crying:  ``Oh my
God,'' and heard a man's voice.

Convinced her daughter was being attacked in her bedroom 100 miles
(160 km) away, she dialed the emergency number 999 and a police
squad sped to the daughter's home to investigate.  ``Officers rushed
round and found she wasn't being attacked--in fact she was quite
willing,'' a police spokesman said.  ``They explained that during
the moments of passion one of the couple [pushed an auto-dial button
on their phone] with a toe.  Unfortunately on both occasions it was
the girl's mother's phone number,'' he said.  ``This is a warning
for other people--if you're going to indulge in this sort of thing,
move the phone.''

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

Subject: mother of all grease fires
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 17:34:09 PDT
From:  Brian Reid

I work in the very center of the city of Palo Alto, in a nice office
building.  We are surrounded on every side by restaurants, hotels,
and so forth.  But we are a computer company, and so our building
ends up needing a lot of electricity.  We use about a megawatt (1
million watts).

In order to deliver a million watts of electricity to an office
building, you need a very large transformer.  These transformers are
too big to put on poles, and besides in quaint downtown areas nobody
likes those poles any more.  So the transformers are put
underground.  The million-watt transformer that powers our office
building is located in an underground vault in the middle of a
walkway that leads to City Hall.  The transformer is about the size
of a small car, and the transformer vault is about the size of a
one-car garage, except that the way you get in is to climb down a
ladder from the street level.  The top of the transformer vault is
well ventilated, because a million-watt transformer generates a lot
of heat.

Several fine restaurants are near this walkway, along with a bank,
an art supply store, and so forth.  There's a lot of foot traffic.
This being California, where it never rains, and this being Palo
Alto, where it is always springtime, the restaurants have outdoor
seating areas that are very popular.

Recently the patrons of one restaurant started to complain that
there was an unpleasant odor in their otherwise idyllic outdoor
seating area.  Soon the Health Department was called, and they
quickly determined that the odor was caused by rancid oil that had
seeped into the sidewalk.  Further investigation showed that the
source of the rancid oil was overflow from a nearby grating.  The
grating was marked ``City of Palo Alto Utilities,'' so the utility
department was called.

The utility crew quickly discovered the problem.  The oil wasn't
really oil, it was molten deep-frying grease, which was molten
because it was being kept warm by a million-watt transformer.  The
entire vault was completely full of used frying grease, about 2000
gallons of it, which was enough to completely cover the transformer.
The heat of the transformer kept the grease from solidifying.

Police quickly figured out what had happened.  Every night for quite
a number of years, one of the nearby restaurants had, at closing
time, emptied its fryer into the transformer vault, thinking that
they were dumping it into the storm sewer.  It's quite illegal to
dump grease into a storm sewer, of course, but they probably figured
they would never get caught.

Transformers do occasionally overheat;  this is why they are kept in
concrete vaults.  If this one had overheated, we would have had the
mother of all grease fires.

Last night they shut off all of the electrical power, pumped out the
hot grease, washed out the vault, and replaced the transformer.
It's very fortunate that nobody was killed.

Today's ``daily special'' menu did not include the usual fried fish.

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJECT: What Not To Write On Your Security Clearance Form
as reported in the silent-tristero list and RISKS

e-t-a-o-n-r-i Spy and the FBI

Reading a book got me into early trouble--I had an FBI record by age
twelve.  This bizarre incident caused a problem much later when I
needed a security clearance.  I learned that I could obtain one only
by concealing my sordid past.

A friend named Bob and I read the book ``Secret and Urgent,'' by
Fletcher Pratt [Blue Ribbon Books;  Garden City, NY;  1942] which
was an early popular account of codes and ciphers.  Pratt showed how
to use letter frequencies to break ciphers and reported that the
most frequently occurring letters in typical English text are
e-t-a-o-n-r-i, in that order.  (The letter frequency order of the
story you are now reading is e-t-a-i-o-n-r.  The higher frequency of
``i'' probably reflects the fact that _I_ use the first person
singular a lot.) Pratt's book also treated more advanced
cryptographic schemes.

Bob and I decided that we needed to have a secure way to communicate
with each other, so we put together a rather elaborate jargon code
based on the principles described in the book.  I don't remember
exactly why we thought we needed it--we spent much of our time
outside of school together, so there was ample time to talk
privately.  Still, you never could tell when you might need to send
a secret message!

We made two copies of the code key (a description of how to encrypt
and decrypt our messages) in the form of a single typewritten sheet.
We each took a copy and carried it on our persons at all times when
we were wearing clothes.

I actually didn't wear clothes much.  I spent nearly all my time
outside school wearing just a baggy pair of maroon swimming trunks.
That wasn't considered too weird in San Diego.

I had recently been given glasses to wear but generally kept them in
a hard case in the pocket of the trousers that I wore to school.  I
figured that this was a good place to hide my copy of the code key,
so I carefully folded it to one-eighth of its original size and
stuck it at the bottom of the case, under my glasses.

Every chance I got, I went body surfing at Old Mission Beach.  I
usually went by streetcar and, since I had to transfer Downtown, I
wore clothes.  Unfortunately, while I was riding the trolley home
from the beach one Saturday, the case carrying my glasses slipped
out of my pocket unnoticed.  I reported the loss to my mother that
night.  She chastised me and later called the streetcar company.
They said that the glasses hadn't been turned in.

After a few weeks of waiting in vain for the glasses to turn up, we
began to lose hope.  My mother didn't rush getting replacement
glasses in view of the fact that I hadn't worn them much and they
cost about $8, a large sum at that time.  (To me, $8 represented 40
round trips to the beach by streetcar, or 80 admission fees to the
movies.)

Unknown to us, the case had been found by a patriotic citizen who
opened it, discovered the code key, recognized that it must belong
to a Japanese spy and turned it over to the FBI This was in 1943,
just after citizens of Japanese descent had been forced off their
property and taken away to concentration camps.  I remember hearing
that a local grocer was secretly a Colonel in the Japanese Army and
had hidden his uniform in the back of his store.  A lot of people
actually believed these things.

About six weeks later, when I happened to be off on another
escapade, my mother was visited by a man who identified himself as
an investigator from the FBI (She was a school administrator, but
happened to be at home working on her Ph.D.  dissertation.) She
noticed that there were two more men waiting in a car outside.  The
agent asked a number of questions about me, including my occupation.
He reportedly was quite disappointed when he learned that I was only
12 years old.

He eventually revealed why I was being investigated, showed my
mother the glasses and the code key and asked her if she knew where
it came from.  She didn't, of course.  She asked if we could get the
glasses back and he agreed.

My mother told the investigator how glad she was to get them back,
considering that they cost $8.  He did a slow burn, then said
``Lady, this case has cost the government thousands of dollars.  It
has been the top priority in our office for the last six weeks.  We
traced the glasses to your son from the prescription by examining
the files of nearly every optometrist in San Diego.'' It apparently
didn't occur to them that if I were a real Japanese spy, I might
have brought the glasses with me from headquarters.

The FBI agent gave back the glasses but kept the code key ``for our
records.'' They apparently were not fully convinced that they were
dealing just with kids.

Since our communication scheme had been compromised, Bob and I
devised a new key.  I started carrying it in my wallet, which I
thought was more secure.  I don't remember ever exchanging any
cryptographic messages.  I was always ready, though.

A few years later when I was in college, I got a summer job at the
Naval Electronics Lab, which required a security clearance.  One of
the questions on the application form was ``Have you ever been
investigated by the FBI?'' Naturally, I checked ``Yes.'' The next
question was, ``If so, describe the circumstances.'' There was very
little space on the form, so I answered simply and honestly, ``I was
suspected of being a Japanese spy.''

When I handed the form in to the security officer, he scanned it
quickly, looked me over slowly, then said, ``Explain
this''--pointing at the FBI question.  I described what had
happened.  He got very agitated, picked up my form, tore it in
pieces, and threw it in the waste basket.

He then got out a blank form and handed it to me, saying ``Here,
fill it out again and don't mention that.  If you do, I'll make sure
that you never get a security clearance.''

I did as he directed and was shortly granted the clearance.  I never
again disclosed that incident on security clearance forms.

On another occasion much later, I learned by chance that putting
certain provocative information on a security clearance form can
greatly speed up the clearance process.  But that is another story.

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJECT: Legal In All 50 States!
Actual advertisement. The address at the bottom is somehow quite appropriate.
-----

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(C) 1990 RBM Ltd., 1200 Shames Drive, Westbury, NY 11590

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