Keith Building
Cleveland, OH
In the spring of 2018, the most watched YouTube video in history (at that time), “Despacito,” was deleted by hackers.
I’d like to think this hack was done by music snobs, another incident in the long tradition of hackers targeting bad music, which, I’d also like to think, I started.
In the late 1990s I worked at one of Cleveland’s first internet service providers (ISPs), inside the Keith Building, an old skyscraper in the city’s theater district. I worked in Level One Tech Support, meaning I answered phone calls from confused users and, as this was during the budding days of the internet, everyone was confused.
People did not grasp even the most rudimentary, computing concepts. I would instruct a user to “Doubleclick on ‘My Computer’” and about 25 percent of the time the customer would snap back: “How am I going to touch your computer?”
“No!” I would interject. I had dealt with this mix-up—where the user does not understand that ‘My Computer’ is an icon—often enough that I knew how to explain it: “When I say ‘My Computer,’ I am not referring to the machine I’m working on. Instead, I want you to look at your screen. On your screen there is an icon with the words ‘MY [here I would pause] COMPUTER.’ That’s what you need to click on; the icon that says, ‘My Computer.’”
“What’s a click?”
W hen you work in tech support, there are two or three calls a day where you ask yourself: do I want to bite this off? Do I want to try and explain how a computer runs to someone who just revealed that they don’t understand how metaphors and symbols work?
The answer often came down to how polite the customer was. If the user was clueless about computers but nice and willing to listen, I would work with them as long as needed to solve the problem. And if the customer was smart but an asshole, we could usually work quickly to figure out the problem. But if they were an asshole and clueless, that was a death blow and I would fake disappointment and say, “Actually, sir, I apologize, upon further investigation, I can’t help you right now; the network perambulator is down.”
Which was, of course, a lie. We were not having an outage and ‘perambulator’ is what the British called a baby carriage when it was first invented. I used the word as an excuse because “perambulator” sounded like the kind of device that an asshole considers essential to the internet.
There were about three of us working at any one time and we supported about 9,000 users in an office that was smaller than any apartment I ever lived in. My manager blasted FM radio while we worked, which we all enjoyed. It created a nice background noise, allowing us to better-focus on our call rather than what the tech two feet from us was saying.
One day I had started working around 11 a.m. and the FM station we were listening to was having an “80s Flashback Lunch.” The DJ came out of the song that was playing with:
“OOOOH! That’s The Clash! With ‘Rock The Casbah’! Their only single to reach the Top 40 chart, and you can see why. Great song! Their other stuff? Pretty iffy if you ask me.”
“WHAT?” I screamed, and immediately hung up on my caller.
“Is there a problem, Sean?” my manager asked.
“Yeah! A huge one! Not sure if you were listening but this DJ just said ‘London Calling’ by the The Clash is ‘iffy.’”
I continued to fly off the handle. I had to ask for a lunch break to process the nonsense this DJ was presiding over our city’s radio waves—the supposed Rock ‘N’ Roll City—and that he thought “Rock The Casbah” was The Clash’s only decent song.
After I returned from the lunch break,and after a fifth consecutive coworker approached me with some version of, “Why are you yelling?” I realized: this was up to me. I was the last sane man in Cleveland. “The ‘80s Flashback Lunch” was brainwashing these poor people.
The DJ of the Flashback Lunch kept boasting that you could email song requests to the station. Back then, email was so new it was discussed like having a new, in-ground pool. Owners would brag about it and insist you come by and use it: “Did you hear? We have an email address now! You must send us a message!”
This was before webmail with unlimited storage. Internet plans back then, even for businesses, had a certain megabyte limit as to how much email could be stored, so email clients would have an option to “DELETE MAIL FROM REMOTE SERVER AFTER DOWNLOAD” to save space. Once you downloaded an email to your computer, the email would be deleted from your ISP’s mail server so the message no longer counts against the storage limit on your plan. This meant that email programs had to pay close attention to which messages were fully downloaded versus which were still being transferred, otherwise they could delete a message from the server before you had a chance to read it.
I assumed this radio station used Macs, and thus would be running a program called Eudora to send and receive email. I also knew Eudora had a flaw in it where, if one sent a huge email to a Eudora user and that user wasn’t patient enough to let the full message download, Eudora created a “temp lock” file that usually resulted in an infinite loop where the user could not download mail. Once the lock was created, most users would become stuck, unable to receive any email until they called their ISP, which would usually need to delete both the lock and the large message that kept causing the loop.
I asked my boss for another break, saying “I think I can finally let this go if I have a sandwich.” My boss assented, and I went and sent a 70 MB email to the radio station.
When I came back to my desk, I heard the DJ return from a commercial break with, “Hey Cleveland, gonna have to ask you to hold off on those email requests. Looks like we are having a problem with our web server. You know how new all this stuff is!”
People think that growing old is terrible but there are many benefits; one of the greatest being: you learn to ignore both bad music and bad opinions about music. After a certain age, bad music is like an ambulance siren blaring off in the distance: You can hear it and know it’s bad, but it’s not intended for you so it goes in one ear and out the other. It’s background noise. It won’t change your mood.
But, in my youth these things enraged me to the point where (on reflection) I flirted with federal hacking crimes.
A few days later I noticed that they were back to taking email requests so I suppose someone fixed the issue. I always wondered if the IT person who corrected it read the email that I had sent which caused the lock. The subject line was “LISTEN TO THIS ASSHOLE!” There was no message body to the email, just a 75 MB attachment named “PROOF.mp3” which was the album “London Calling” as a MP3.
I remember thinking, as I sent the email, “This might be illegal; not sure, but no judge in the world is going to convict me for defending The Clash. I’ll just introduce ‘Rudy Can’t Fail’ as Exhibit A and the case will be dismissed.”
WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?
Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.
This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.
Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.
Purchase Full Book:
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$19.99This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.
I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.
—S. B-F