MISCHIEF

It was time for their monthly meeting. Of course their year had 17 months in it, so they had quite a few more meeting than the average organization. Actually there was nothing average about their membership either. There were elves, gnomes, gremlins, ogres, sprits, spirits, and all sorts of other-worldly creatures and entities. Theirs was not a new collection of like-minded individuals. No they had been around for almost as long as there had been life on the planet. Actually in the leader’s manual there was a chapter devoted to activities prior to Earth. Although it was spelled differently and there might be some confusion with the word “urd” which had been translated as “Earth” by the Language Committee.

While they had rules, it was against the very soul of the membership to obey them. Actually the Language Committee had struck the word “Obey” out of the dictionary several millenniums ago.  They had an official name but they rarely used it and it was on the books simply so that they could copy-write it for their bumper-stickers. They made a nice bit of change from the “MISCHIEF” stickers. A few years back they thought of taking a famous writer to court for copy-write infringement over the use of the phrase “mischief managed.” It was only when their in-house counsel informed them that they might well have to physically appear in court to defend their claim that they dropped the idea.

The Legal Committee was one of the strongest and most respected sub-group. There simply was no way to estimate just how much damage the Legal Committee had inflicted upon the general population. Both from their work with the legislators who devised the cockamamie laws, to the court system that enforced those totally ridiculous pieces of lawful paper. They loved to put in phrases like “For the public good” and “needed for the defense of the country” since the interpretation of those clauses within a law could easily take more than just a few lifetimes. Even then the enforcement of such beauties could tie up the courts for ages. Add to that, just try to imagine how difficult it was for the police to issue citations. A man spits while outside. Should he be given a ticket for expectorating in public? After all, the world needs to be protected from such blatant releases of potentially dangerous germs. But what if the man spit on a grassy surface, wouldn’t it then be an act of flora protection by actually watering the grass. Or, could the accused claim that he was spitting as an act of protest over the unfair way that citizens are treated by the Administration. Wouldn’t such an act then be protected as an expression of “Free Speech?”  Yes the lawyers had been at the top of the points list even before ambulances had been invented. After all it was their group that posted the “No Smoking” signs all over Pompeii.

Times change, however, and others were getting their chance to thrive in this new electronic age. For instance, back when clothes were cleaned by banging them on a rock in the river, the best they could hope for was a smashed thumb as someone slipped during the saber tooth tiger fabric softening cycle. Now the mismatched sock crew was consistently near the top of the leader board. Of course they suffered some significant losses when “Pantyhose” were invented.

So too did the group best known for their invention of the missing last page in the early “Who Done It” books. Today’s reader, using those damned electronic books could simply download another copy before the butler could hide the knife in the flour bin. They suffered mightily when books no longer had pages that could be loosened by drying out the glue that bound the pages in the correct order.

The trolls who had been one of the best know groups for their mislabeled highway signs that led drivers into dead ends that were too tight to maneuver out of, had been devastated by those “GPS” devices. It didn’t seem to matter to drivers that the sign at the corner said “Road Out” for the only entrance to the thruway for the next twenty miles. Their GPS said take the turn and then they were on their way with no time lost for the traditional “doubling back” maneuver.

Even the smallest of their group had been affected by the electronic age. Those little devils that would go into the libraries and check out all of the copies of “Tom Sawyer” just before the end of the summer reading period, when all of the procrastinators suddenly remembered they had to finish the book they hadn’t yet started by the end of the week. Panic no longer reigned supreme at the doors of those mighty edifices.  Instead, those members of the “I can do it later” club simply went to their computers and downloaded the Bill’s Notes” summaries and were on their way to another last ditch effort paper.

Yes there was suffering across the board among the members of Mischief. But as often happens, just when all hope is lost and the world seems cloaked in darkness a light glows in the distance and all flock toward it. [Side note: This used to be known as the “Lemming’s gambit.” One of the members who had wings would take a torch and hover just beyond the edge of a cliff on dark nights. Yes, it used to be great fun to watch them plummet into the sea. Those were the good-old-days they would recall.]

Today’s meeting had a special agenda item, which promised a chance to recover from the influence of those pesky electrons. The Programming Committee was presenting a proposal that they hinted could be the answer to all of the group’s problems.  Now the Programmers were held in high regard. They were the ones who came up with the idea of video games which had been responsible for thousands of the young people missing out on almost all study time as they chased and shot the bad guys in a hundred different scenarios.

The meeting was called to order by the head of the group, who was traditionally called “Miss Chief” whether they were male or female. This year’s director, who was a young ogre who had just the right amount of ugliness to complement her atrocious taste in clothing, announced that they were going to wave the reading of the minutes in favor of giving the Programming Committee more time to explain their proposal. 

The committee Chair Person came to the front of the hall and took a drink from the glass on the podium. It was a dribble glass of course, and the hall broke into raucous laughter at the evidence of that tried and true bit of humor. He was dressed in a button down shirt, with the buttons miss attached so that it was impossible to have the shirt buttoned properly. The shirt had two breast pockets, both of which had pocket protectors that were stuffed with ball point pens whose ink had dried out.

He pressed a button on his remote control and the screen behind him came to life after just a few flickers to show that the light tube would fail at any moment. There across the expanse of white was the word “Virus.”

From the back of the room an uproar was starting with the members of the Medical Subcommittee. They had been in disgrace ever since they had misnamed the latest plague, the “Dog & Cat Flu.” Scientists had found a cure for the malady and renamed it the “Bird Flu” so no one lost anything over the blunder. Actually the veterinary community thrived for a while as they were overcome with the calls to inoculate people from the flu that their pets carried.

The Programming Chair let the hub-bub boil for a while before he asked for order. “No,” he said. “This is not a blatant infringement of the territory of the Medical Committee. Instead, it takes what was an error on their part with the miss-naming of the flu outbreak and uses the power of names that they discovered to further insure that our committee’s project will succeed.”

The Medical Committee members bristled at the charge of their error, but of course they were used to it ever since hospitals starting counting the numbers of sponges before the surgeons sewed up their patients.  They still had the whole wrong leg amputation ploy to work with, but even that was failing thanks to computers in the operating room.

The Programmer continued to speak. “We have all suffered losses from the influence of computers to organize, sort, and correctly direct information. Literally thousands of children who in the past would be sitting there trying to get their abacuses or slide-rulers to give them the answer to the problems set before them, now have that dreadful computer to rely on. I know that the “Literature and Printing Subcommittee” has had little success overcoming the solutions that the computer has given their former victims.

“The computer does it faster and better every year. There seems to be no end to the number of problems that we have foisted upon the world which the computer can cure. It is that reliance upon the computer for solutions that inspired us. ‘What,’ we asked ourselves, “If that ever increasingly sophisticated and complicated computer got sick?” Laughter began to spread across the room and the still smarting Medical Committee members shouted from the back of the room, “It’s a machine you pencil pushing geek. Machines don’t get sick.”

The programmer simply said, “Not yet they don’t.” Silence began to spread from the front of the room to the back just like a gentle wave upon the beach.

He continued with his presentation. “We thought that we might be able to use the complexity of the machines to work against them. Especially if we introduced little problems that people might overlook until it was too late. Suppose we were able to make the computers believe it was a different date than reality. If the computer thought it was January 3^rd, when in reality it was January 4^th all of those meeting reminders would fail. Wives wouldn’t get the flowers that the husband intended to send, and small children wouldn’t get those birthday presents from their grandmas.

“We began to come up with a slew of small problems that would be easy to introduce. The automatic ‘Save’ function could be turned off and thousands of doctoral thesis would be lost or at least damaged.  Automatic updates could be changed to times when the user was not normally on the machine and they wouldn’t realize that their systems were out of date. 

“It was while we were working on this that Elrod, our leader in the misaligned access protocols group, came up with the idea of calling the collection of the newly induced problems  ‘viruses.’ If people thought their computers were suffering from something called a virus they wouldn’t try to fix the problem themselves. Instead they would flock to computer ‘doctors’ for a cure. Of course computer programmers would see the opportunity for fame and glory, not to mention a stream of money they hadn’t been able to make unless they moved to California. They would therefore make these viruses seem to be so complex and difficult to handle, that only the bravest of the Geeks would be able to fix them.

“We brought in a group of computer hackers and ner-do-wells who lived in their parent’s basements and lived on energy drinks and orange colored snacks to test out our theories. We were surprised at the results. Instead of looking at changing the date the computer saw as a problem too small to have any influence the user, they applauded our genius.  In a time period too short to measure without an atomic clock they had jumped into the idea and started to generate more ‘viruses’ than we would have thought possible.

“They turned their creative minds towards developing ever more sophisticated sub-routines. They even found that they could conceal these programming packets and attach them to E-Mails…” A groan came from the animal training group that found E-mails to be repugnant. They had worked for years to develop the gene that made Mail-men’s pants irresistible to dogs, only to have almost three quarters of the mail being delivered today to travel electronically.

“No wait, if this works people may become wary of using E-mail for communication.  They may be so afraid of succumbing to one of these ‘viruses’ that they prefer to call people instead of E-mailing them. [Historical side note: This meeting took place before the advent of “Smarter-Phones” that would allow people to bypass even E-mailing and use another method of avoiding direct contact with other people. These no-physical contact systems are of course the work of the Population Subcommittee that is working to reduce the overall population of the world by limiting the opportunity of humans to become aroused by the actual physical presence of the opposite sex. This, it is hoped, will allow cats to become the numerically dominant species since cats can’t be bothered to use texting. In fact with the advent of those phones and the ability of “viruses” to force miss alerts on computers, a whole generation of cats who have never been taken to the vets in time to prevent their first litter will arise.]

The presentation went on for some time with the demonstrations of how each of the viruses would impact t computers and their users. With the promise of the release of these viruses, and the virtual Tsunami of problems they would create, the group adjourned to the bar where drinks flowed to the members of the Programming Committee.