This is a true story of how I got a Message From The Swedish Prime Minister.
I don’t recall how the call came in – I think it was to Fred Avolio – but the White House public relations people had gotten themselves into a tizzy because, shortly after “whitehouse.gov” went online, someone called someone and said “the Swedish Prime Minister has sent an email to president@whitehouse.gov.”
If you’ve ever watched any episodes of VEEP let me say that their portrayal of Washington ‘important people’ is practically a documentary. The level of incompetence, hype, thrashing about pointlessly, finger-pointing, and back-stabbing is truly amazing. One of the things that VEEP represents well is how great big important situations emerge from little mole-hills because the Washington set simply cannot accept how unimportant they are. Something like the Swedish Prime Minister sending an email – it’s an opportunity for drama! For one thing, it might reveal that Bill Clinton did not sit up all night reading his emails, and that the server was not in the White House proper.
There were phone calls about what to do. In my memory, it was Fred – who tends to be much more calm than me and who was my boss – who sorted the whole thing out: Marcus was going to log into the machine and find the email. The email was then going to be printed out and FAXed to the White House Public Relations people. They were going to draft a response and FAX that back. Then Fred and I were going to type in exactly what the FAX said, double and triple-check it, and hit send. And so it happened.
There was no actual president@whitehouse.gov account on the server, because it was just an inbound email address and it was unnecessary, so I created a temporary account that could originate the response. Being fair experts at back-tracking email, Fred and I decided this was the only way to do it that would have all the correct fingerprints of an actual email from president@whitehouse.gov. The best fakes are real.
grep -n '^From.*\.[Ss][Ee]"'/var/incoming/president
-Ding-
When I moved up to the farm, I threw away a lot of my old junk and I believe the FAX on White House letterhead wound up in a landfill someplace, but I may still have it. If I still have it, I know where it would be and I’ll look for it next time I’m at the shop, so I can scan it in. It was some mumble-mum about “Yes, the internet is great.” But, as you can see from The Swedish Prime Minister’s message, he was actually trying to do politics via email. Clearly Marcus and Fred were not qualified to play at this level, and neither were the White House Public Relations people, so there was authentic scrambling and hair-pulling. It was all extremely dramatic. It was all like an episode of VEEP.
Eventually, the FAX from the White House got typed in and checked, re-checked, re-re-checked, and I hit Ctrl-D, deleted The President’s login, and we went off to bed, our first experience at the front line of international diplomacy was over.
Around 2000, I was a speaker at a conference up in Sweden, and a tall, slow-moving, slow-talking gentleman came up to me during the coffee break:
Him: “Hello Marcus. I don’t think we’ve ever met but we exchanged an important email, once.”
Me: (thinking hard; important emails are not something I remember) “Uh, yes, well, that’s very interesting. What are you referring to?”
Him: “It was from a BITNET node at a Swedish University.”
Me: (By this point I was stumped) “I’m stumped. Tell me more.”
He then told me an absurd story about how he was a system administrator at a Swedish University’s BITNET node (SUNET) and he got a call: “The Swedish Prime Minister is going to send Bill Clinton an email!” and things were worked out: he got a FAX from the Swedish Prime Minister’s Public Relations people, and he typed the FAX in, double checked it and triple-checked it, then hit “send.” Then he found out that he had to wait in his office for several hours for a reply, which he printed out and FAXed to The Swedish Prime Minister’s Public Relations people, then went home, and went to bed.
Were you still using thermal fax paper in ’94? Because if you were, it’s almost certainly gone – the thermal paper wasn’t stable, and fades over time. I used to work in a large government bureaucracy that kept extensive files, and I remember noticing a lot of blank sheets of fax paper in old files…
I don’t know exactly why, but I really, really like the ending of this story.
A perfect ending. I hope you both had a good laugh about it.
It really sounds like a sitcom plot.
@Me, #1: He said “White House letterhead”, so it can’t have been thermal paper. That stuff came on rolls. Duh.
The irony of symmetry. Or something like it.
It is odd how worried people get about their own imagined importance. I suppose they think other people are noticing how important they are, when all the time, those other people are simply worrying about their own importance and don’t notice how important someone else is trying to look.
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fusilier
James 2:24
Marvellous! This also answers that age-old question, “where would we be without technology?” Clearly the answer is, “in bed, sleeping soundly, instead of sitting here waiting for my computer to do something.”
P.S.: If nothing else this story has inspired me to create the rank and title of Imperial Bellhop – just in case I ever do lower myself to world domination. It would only be bestowed on individuals who have much better things to do with their time and rather would.
Fake news!
All you would have received was some error message about mismatched quotes.
Reginald Selkirk@#9:
Yeah, I got that wrong. But since the leading quote was a single, the shell would have just kept collecting keystrokes including the carriage return.
I’m rusty. Grrrrr…
Fred and I were at an ISOC meeting; I believe it was Columbus, so the FAX machine was whatever the hotel had. I distinctly recall that the FAX was thermal – someone at the WH had printed their originating message on letterhead and then FAXed that – it looked like crap but that hardly mattered.
I can see I will have to grovel through my papers-box from that period, and check my memories drawer.
komarov@#8:
is, “in bed, sleeping soundly, instead of sitting here waiting for my computer to do something.”
I was pretty unexcited by all the claims that the web was going to change everything. Well, it’s had a huge impact on my life, but it seems to be a mixed bag. It has tremendously advanced the art of Time Wasting, but isn’t that what time is for?
kestrel@#6:
A wonderful point, probably worth an entire post.
There is one kind of person that always makes me a bit worried, and that is the person who intently and quietly observes others. My opinion is that the vast majority of people run about wrapped in the drama of their personal soap-opera (or sitcom) and hardly notice other people at all.
There is one kind of person that always makes me a bit worried, and that is the person who intently and quietly observes others.
That would be me, and I’m watching because you all seem to know each other and have something to talk about, and I don’t know how to butt in without seeming too self-important. In other words, I’m harmless.
Only people who have been privileged already before the advent of the Internet can say so. If you live in some poorer country in some remote corner of the world, the Internet becomes the best source of education and employment. In my case, local libraries and bookstores suck. They offer the Latvian translation of “Twilight” and “Harry Potter,” but they have hardly any books actually worth reading, they just don’t have any foreign language textbooks. If I want to learn something, I have to get my textbooks either from pirate web sites or from online bookstores. Same goes for employment. There are no good art galleries near where I live. The only way how I can sell my work is via the Internet.
As for time wasting, yes, I agree. It’s not like I have never noticed the drawbacks of the Internet. However, wasting your time is a choice; you can also choose not to do that. Moreover, if you enjoy yourself while you are wasting your time, then I perceive that as a great activity—the way I see it, my life and my time is meant for my enjoyment and pleasure.
Yep. Growing up, I got used to people caring about me and micromanaging every aspect of my life. For example, at school my teachers were obsessed about what clothes I wore and praised me whenever I put on feminine looking attire and criticized me for my usual gender neutral navy blue or black pants and sweaters.
By the time I realized that I don’t want to live as a woman, I was afraid to change my appearance towards something more masculine, because I expected people to care for my looks and criticize me. I was so wrong there. It turned out that nobody cares about me or my looks.* The reality was that my imagined importance was exactly that—imagined. There was no reason to worry about my appearance because others just didn’t care about me. And, frankly, being ignored has plenty of benefits—I can go on with my daily life without worrying about how others will perceive me or what they will think about me, because they just don’t think or care about me. Cool!
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* Except for a bunch of transphobes who go out of their way and waste their own precious time on Earth in order to inform me about the fact that their God disapproves of my lifestyle choices. What a bunch of weirdos! Don’t they have a life of their own?
cvoinescu@#14:
That would be me, and I’m watching because you all seem to know each other and have something to talk about, and I don’t know how to butt in without seeming too self-important. In other words, I’m harmless.
“Let me have men about me who are oblivious. Yon Cassius has an attentive look. Such men are dangerous.” Or something like that. Good to know the observers may also be harmless.
Ieva Skrebele@#15:
Except for a bunch of transphobes who go out of their way and waste their own precious time on Earth in order to inform me about the fact that their God disapproves of my lifestyle choices. What a bunch of weirdos! Don’t they have a life of their own?
Think what misery their lives must be – they have a belief system that’s as absurd as something out of a Monty Python sketch, and they are trying to live their life in accordance with them. They must disapprovingly watch others because that way they don’t have to look at themselves and realize what sad unaccomplished little people they are.
Ieva Skrebele@#15:
Only people who have been privileged already before the advent of the Internet can say so. If you live in some poorer country in some remote corner of the world, the Internet becomes the best source of education and employment.
Yeah, that’s true. I was wrong.
Somehow this makes me wonder if Dolt 45 has discovered emoticons, and what godawfulness his use of them
mightwill produce.You know, some person who is attentive can also fake an oblivious facial expression in order to appear harmless.