Dear Crazy Domains,
I am writing to congratulate you on your superb choice of name. Never have I found a company with such an apt choice of name. Which advertising house came up with that name? Please let me know which one so I can write to them as well and congratulate them on their stunning work.
On Tuesday, the 11th of September, your service, as you may remember, was unavailable for over eight hours. My website was unavailable and I had no access to emails either in a receiving or sending capacity. I rang your support line numerous times and was puzzled to realise it was unattended. I would have thought that on a day where your service became inactive for such a long amount of time, you would have thought to perhaps leave a message to explain what was going on. Then I realised that you were, indeed, staying true to your name and were indeed showing what a ‘Crazy’ bunch of people you are.
I then found another reason as to the selection of your name. It was I who was the ‘Crazy’ one, who had gone to your service, for I must be ‘Crazy’ to invest my time, contacts and business into a company which can and does, at any time, stop functioning for an unspecified amount of time.
When I didn’t get a response by telephone, email or twitter, I began to suspect something a little more sinister may have happened to your system.
There are many conspiracy theories going around about internet security and I have a question for you which I’ll just ask you outright.
We have seen, on the news, in the last few days, the reactions worldwide regarding an American film portraying the prophet Mohammad in a negative fashion and the associated backlash around the world.
Is this somehow related? Were your servers hijacked by terrorist organisations from either side of that debate?
I’m asking you this because a day before your server crashed, I sent an email to a colleague containing a news article about a riot in Cairo. Have I done something wrong? If it was my fault, I apologise profusely.
I thought of other organisations who may have a hand in cyber terrorism and all the signs pointed back to me. I trawled through my emails and here are some examples of what I found.
31st of August, 2012
‘…Gee, had I have known that she was going to react that way, I wouldn’t have told Ira about you and Zac’. This could easily have been interpreted as Jihad.
1st of September, 2012
‘Ira has gone completely nuts, you really should sort out that mess’. My friend’s name, Ira, particularly when referred to as ‘going nuts’, could be implied to be the Irish Republican Army.
3rd of September, 2012
‘Ben, can you just give me your ETA? I don’t want to be stuck talking to Ira for too long.’ This email has implied that I am a member of the Basque Separatist Group, ETA.
5th of September, 2012
‘Fark, can you just come? I REALLY don’t want to talk to Ira.’ In this instance, I had changed the spelling of a commonly used expletive to ensure politeness, but it could implicate me in organising with the South American group FARC.
8th of September, 2012
‘Do you like the hexagonal ring which Zac gave you?’ … ‘We should all go bowling, there’s that place in Lakemba to celebrate Ira moving away’ … Whilst these sentences were in different paragaphs, they were in the same email and the coding could be taken to mean heZbola, an incorrect spelling of Hezbollah.
Can you see the correlations in my emails with the incorrect labelling of myself being involved in terrorist organisations to be responsible for the outage of your systems on Tuesday?
I would really like to plead my case well, I don’t like the thought of Guantanamo Bay at all. Can I count on Crazy Domains as someone to help me out of this mess?
I’m worried and every time there is a knock on the door, I envisage Tactical Response Group officers running through my apartment to take me away. It is a strange fear, mind you; I’d imagine that TRG officers wouldn’t find the need to knock, would you?
Once again, I apologise for causing the outage, I’ll be more careful in future and I will scan my emails more carefully, making sure that there are no sentences that could be interpreted as terrorist coding in any way.
I’d still like to take the opportunity to suggest that it’s a good idea to answer your phones when your system has been down for that length of time as having them unattended can lead to panic, particularly when terrorism is involved.
Kind Regards,
Andy Leonard
