“Striking Sparks” — Page Fifteen
Just making things a little more difficult for the Men in Black.
More below!
Bobservations:
Paper Trails
Sparking (ha!) off Wallend’s comment in today’s page, I personally just received the form from the State Fire Marshal which allows me to renew my Pyrotechnic Special Effects license. And when I say “received the form” I mean “I was mailed a piece of cheap paper that is purple for some reason which has been obviously been ground forth from a computer that may or may not — judging from the font, clip art and general layout — be still running DOS.” The print is not quite dot-matrix, but it is definitely skewed off-center, like the sheet feeder needs some adjustment or maybe just a smack on side of the paper tray.
I am supposed to fill out this form and mail it back to the Fire Marshal, along with a check, via snail mail. No envelope is provided.
Now, Occam’s Razor would likely dictate this to be simply the signs of a small department with an insufficient staff and/or budget. But personally, I suspect it is all deliberate.
Like many of you, I do all my bill-paying online these days. Even when a check has to be mailed, such as to the artist of this comic, I just tickle my keyboard for a few seconds and the bank promptly prints out a check at some automated station miles away and mails it for me. I never even see it. If I were for some special-effects related reason unable to use the keyboard, such as my fingers being currently scattered in the bushes or something, my wife or someone else could press the keys and the check would go out just the same. No one would know the difference.
I even pay other state and city fees this same automated way.
But in order to renew this license, the license that allows me to have state-sanctioned dispensation to melt plastic army men on the BBQ grill, I have to fill out a form. By hand. There is no way to scan this dark purple paper into the computer; and the printing is skewed so that I could not possibly fill it out legibly via typewriter, even assuming I had such a relic about the place. No, I have to fill it out using a pen. And sign it. And write an actual physical check. And sign that. And find an envelope and address it and seal it with my own saliva, probably so they have my DNA in the process.
By the time I’m done, there will be no doubt that it was me, and only me, that filled out that form. They could prove it six ways from Sunday should they ever have to; and that, I suspect, is the whole point.
I just dragged out my business checkbook. It is dusty and the checks inside are crackly and a bit faded. Checking the ledger, I see that the last time I actually used it to hand-write a check was at this time last year.
To the State Fire Marshal.
Yep. All deliberate, I just know it.
— Paranoid Bob out
“If the system ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
You’ll probably work through that entire cheque book to the Fire Marshall till you retire. (Do men ever retire from blowing stuff up?)
Requiring the hand-written form and hand-written check probably are deliberate, to ensure that the person applying for a pyrotechnic license actually has functioning hands. No, that makes too much sense for a government agency, so that can’t be the reason. Bureaucrats that are too lazy to update the system seems much more believable. Especially since the positions to handle that paperwork are almost certainly government union jobs, so those can never be allowed to go away. Never.
By the way, I once looked directly into a neuralyz… Hey buddy, where did you get those great sunglasses?
I love the detective’s opinion of bureaucracy and her method of gaining more time. She can also ask Wallend to mail the disks to the agencies care of the Timbuktu council. Yes, such a agency DOES exist in Constantinople [Notice the city name… ;-)].
I hate the fact I have to navigate around companies loading their adds as tabs and popups to comment to this comic.
Really? Are you getting popups? That shouldn’t be happening.
If you’re just talking about the “click for the rest of this post” thing — that’s just a WordPress option I was playing with. (“Oo! Button! Shiny!”) Probably drop it.
No. when I click to make a comment (or click for any other reason), I get sent to another website advertising anti-virus programs, cars, food, you name it.
Okay, well, first off, thanks for not using AdBlocker. 🙂
More seriously: I’ve been trying to replicate that problem on two different machines and three different browsers, and I’m getting nothing. That kind of clickjacking certainly shouldn’t be happening, but it may not be the site itself. All the security software is up-to-date. Is anyone else having this happen?
Valkeiper, you on a PC or a Mac?
To me that sounds like you’re playing host to some malware. Doa quick scan with spybot or something to investigate. Good luck!
Talking about “paranoid”… I never trusted any security that was is needed to do online banking and such. Whenever a change of security was done, it was done because the previous (level of) security turned out to be not secure enough. Plus, getting to know the level of hacking the NSA can do… (https://www.schneier.com:443/) Criminals may are likely less advanced, but still. Remember the Sony rootkit and how long it took until criminals found a way to utilize it?
And now for something completely different: Does anybody have experiences in frying CDs/DVDs, especially in such a way that they look OK but the data is severely damaged anyway? I never tried it myself but assumed that the damage would be visible.
A good acid wash will leave the disk seemingly physically fine, but the fine grooves which store the data will be all wonky, hopefully corrupting them to the point of near-uselessness.
Acid? I dunno… It would need to go through the protecting layer and the metallic layer without leaving visible damage. What kind of acid might be capable of doing that?
Then I’d rather leave the CD / DVD outside exposed to full sunlight for some days. But that takes days instead of minutes…
love this comic!