"Vernor Vinge - The Cookie Monster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

messages? That’s the only way I can imagine this happening–"

"No. I have not. I’ve answered twenty-two questions so far, and I’ve been AnnetteG all the way."
The fake signature was built into her "send" key. Mr. Johnson said this was to protect employee
privacy and give users a feeling of continuity even though follow-up questions would rarely come
to the original responder. He didn’t have to say that it was also to make sure that LotsaTech
support people would be interchangeable, whether they were working out of the service center in
Lahore or Londonderry–or Los Angeles. So far, that had been one of Dixie Mae’s few disappointments
about this job; she could never have an ongoing helpful relationship with a customer.

So what the devil was this all about?

"Ah! Here it is." Victor waved at the screen. "What do you make of it?"

The message had come in on the help address. It was in the standard layout enforced by the query
acceptance page. But the "previous responder field" was not one of the house sigs. Instead it was:

Ditzie May Lay

"Grow up, Victor."

Victor raised his hands in mock defense, but he had seen her expression, and some of the smirk
left his face. "Hey, Dixie Mae, don’t kill the messenger. This is just what came in."

"No way. The server-side script would have rejected an invalid responder name. You faked this."

For a fleeting moment, Victor looked uncertain. Hah! thought Dixie Mae. She had been paying
attention during Mr. Johnson’s lectures; she knew more about what was going on here than Victor-
the-great-mind. And so his little joke had fallen flat on its rear end. But Victor regrouped and
gave a weak smile. "It wasn’t me. How would I know about this, er, nickname of yours?"

"Yes," said Dixie Mae, "it takes real genius to come up with such a clever play on words."

"Honest, Dixie Mae, it wasn’t me. Hell, I don’t even know how to use our form editor to revise
header fields."

Now that claim had the ring of truth.

"What’s happening?"

They looked up, saw Ulysse standing at the entrance to the cubicle.

Victor gave her a shrug. "It’s Dit–Dixie Mae. Someone here at LotsaTech is jerking her around."

Ulysse came closer and bent to read from the display. "Yech. So what’s the message?"

Dixie Mae reached across the desk and scrolled down the display. The return address was
lusting925@freemail.sg. The topic choice was "Voice Formatting." They got lots on that topic;
Voxalot format control wasn’t quite as intuitive as the ads would like you to believe.