The PDF Purim

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, March 25, 2005

 

Throughout history, Jews around the world have dedicated special "Purims" to commemorate their delivery from calamities of all sorts, including anti-Semites, war, evil kings, etc. Many of these days were celebrated with special ceremonies, scrolls, and festive meals – just like the original Purim.

 

I recently came into possession of an ancient (pre-Windows 95, apparently) scroll that purports to tell the story of yet another miraculous event, that happened in an office,  far away and a long, long time ago. I have heard that the day is still commemorated in certain startups, on which day programmers get together in the company conference room, eat sushi in a celebratory luncheon, and read the scroll.  And for those who don't like Sushi there are bagels and cream cheese.

 

1. And it came to pass in the days of Shoeshine, a startup that had 127 people working to produce an application that would make delivery of voice over IP services faster.

2. In those days as Shoeshine's staff struggled to meet its quarterly benchmarks upon which the next round of VC funding was dependent, for otherwise the staff would be on the unemployment line.

3. That the evil and corrupt Herman, the company's system administrator, was approached by Shoshine's rivals, Zeresh Incorporated, and was offered a deal to transfer intellectual property for the breakthrough product that could make Shoeshine's workers wealthy.

4. And Herman agreed to do this evil thing, because he had not received a raise from the company for lo these 10 months.

5. And as the system administrator he had read an e-mail from the company's CEO, Mr. Aki, addressed to the company's programming staff promising them raises.

6. And he was not comforted when he approached Mr. Aki, who told him the programmers were working very hard overtime to meet the benchmarks and needed the incentive, but if their efforts were successful it would pay off for everybody.

7. Thus when the opportunity to defect to Zeresh arose he was glad, because this way he could have his revenge on not only Mr. Aki but the programmers as well, who were always bossing him around and bothering him with nonsensical system questions that anybody with basic knowledge of computers would know the answers to but they were obviously too lazy to do the work themselves.

8. And so he exchanged a series of e-mails with the Zeresh people in which they worked out a deal where Herman would receive 10,000 shares in a silver mine in exchange for the code for the "killer app" developed by Shoeshine, plus a plane ticket to Mexico.

9. So he craftily began opening files and saving them as PDFs, for this was the format the Zeresh system administrator had requested they be sent over in, because Shoeshine used GNU license programs like OpenOffice for their documentation, while Zeresh of course used only Office.

10. But to avoid detection he decided he would save only small sections – five or ten lines each – into multiple coded files so it would seem as if someone in the office was just working on a piece of code instead of raising suspicion with huge files being copied over the network.

11. And to avoid detection he copied files on CDs with an old CD burner he had in his office instead of sending the files via e-mail.

12. There was one programmer in the central processing department whose name was Maury, who had been with the company since its early days when it was working on producing methods to automate the manufacture of shoe polish.

13. His office was adjacent to Herman's, from which every day there would emit loud noises that Herman said was music but Maury said was just noise.

14. And Maury would knock on the wall between his and Herman's office each day to signal that Herman should lower the volume on his streaming Internet radio.

15. But on one particular day when Herman knocked on the wall there was no response and the music remained as loud as ever.

16. And Maury walked into Herman's office to ask him to lower the volume, but Herman was out of the office at that moment.

17. So Maury walked around to Herman's desk when he noticed the e-mail on the screen from Zeresh which outline the deal, which Maury read in horror.

18. But then he heard Herman speaking in the corridor and he ran out of the office quickly, and miraculously he remained undetected.

19. And Maury went and told his trusted programming assistant Ethel all that had happened, and they said they must gather evidence and confront Mr. Aki to prove their case, for otherwise Herman would claim that the programmers were ganging up against him and he would destroy the evidence.

20. So Maury said it would be best if Ethel were to somehow engage Herman and keep him busy while Maury built a dossier on Herman.

21. So while Ethel kept Herman busy with a system problem she made up and then invited Herman for coffee in the employee lounge, Maury quickly searched Herman's e-mail, but saw that the incriminating letter had already been deleted already.

22. And Herman became exceedingly angry at Ethel's questions, and he made a mental note to himself to erase her from the company payroll file at his earliest opportunity.

23. Then Maury copied the contents of the CDs that were Herman's desk onto his computer over the network in the hope that they were the correct ones referred to in the e-mail he had read.

24. And when he sat at his own PC to check the files he saw it was but a hopeless task because there were thousands of PDF files, and Herman would just claim he was mMr. Aking a routing backup, for he had doctored the file names to appear as if they had been produced by the company's backup program.

25. But then Maury remembered that he had read about a program that could take individual PDF files and make them into one big file, as well as perform all sorts of other tricks with PDFs, such as encrypting or decrypting them, fill PDF forms, split PDFs into separate files, and all sorts of other tasks that could usually only be done by expensive PDF programs like Acrobat but in this case was free.

26. So he quickly downloaded PDFtk from http://www.accesspdf.com, and using the program's command line function quickly concatenated all the PDFs in the folder into one big document, with a key page in the middle that outlined the plan he had read in the e-mail, which he found by searching the huge document, something that would have been impossible to do so quickly if the evidence had remained buried inside all those PDFs.

27. Thus Maury and Ethel walked into the CEO's office and told company leader Mr. Aki that they had important news about Herman the system administrator, and Mr. Aki said to call Herman into his office immediately, because he had said that it was bad for company morale to talk about other employees behind their back.

28. So Herman walked into the office and felt honored, because he thought Maury and Ethel were there to shower him with compliments, because he had heard from Mr. Aki's secretary Vicky that he was indeed to get his raise.

29. But his joy turned to panic and then anger when Maury and Ethel laid out the whole plan, and showed Mr. Aki the evidence that they had discovered, thanks to PDFtk.

30. Whereby Mr. Aki called in the guys from the QA department who instead of eating lunch worked out in the company gym every day and were really strong, so they were able to take Herman outside and beat him to a pulp.

31. And the Shoeshine company was joyful and glad and Mr. Aki decided that they would declare the day they foiled Herman a company holiday, and on that day instead of having Coke and pizza they would order beer and sushi for all the workers, and NIS 250 in bonus coupons to use in the supermarket, which was less than they got at major holidays like Pesach, but of course was more than workers in other companies got for minor holidays.

32. And Maury and Ethel received the keys to Herman's private closet, where they discovered a whole stash of office supplies that the evil Herman was apparently planning to take with him when he jumped ship.

33. And afterwards the company did indeed meet its benchmarks and received further VC funding, after which a big American conglomerate bought them out and gave all the workers huge stock options which they all sold at the top of the market and retired on.

34. So they lived happily ever after.

 

Download PDFtk from http://www.accesspdf.com (click the link on the left). Free, for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.

 

ds@newzgeek.com