From: JoAnn Williams
To: Mike Williams
Subject: your father
Body:
Mike, your father had a heart attack this morning. He is in the critical care ward at Meriter Hospital. I’m at the hospital with him. Sorry to send this email, but cell phones don’t work here, and there’s a computer in the room here. I know you check your email constantly.
Please fly out on the next plane you can get and meet us at the hospital. Hurry!
Meriter was one of the larger hospitals in Madison. Mike picked up a rental car at the airport, and swore at himself as he heavy-footed the throttle and sent the wheels spinning. The snowfall was getting heavier, and by the time he parked at the hospital, there was a two inch accumulation on the ground.
Turning his coat collar up, Mike made his way to the visitor’s entrance. He gave his father’s name at the reception desk as he briskly rubbed his hands together. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. He was dressed for the above-freezing temperatures of Portland, not the twenty degree temperatures of Madison. The white-haired receptionist slowly shook her head and asked Mike again for the name. Mike told her again, spelling it out carefully. Mike waited, bouncing on his heels with anxiety as she searched again.
“Sorry, son. There’s no record that your father is here.”
“That’s impossible. My mother said he was here. He had a heart attack yesterday.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s no record of him being here.”
“Could he have been here, but checked out? Could they be here under my mother’s name?”
The receptionist checked again, and checked for his mother’s name, but sadly shook her head both times. “I’m real sorry. Could they be at another hospital?”
Mike looked again at the email from his mother, which clearly stated Meriter Hospital. He supposed his mother could have made a mistake, being worried herself. He jumped as the phone buzzed in his hand.
A new email from his mother. Cryptically it told him to come to his parent’s home in Boscobel, a two hour drive. Mike looked back out through the lobby doors. A two hour drive in good weather, and a three or four hour drive in what was now looking like a serious snowstorm.
Mike thanked the receptionist, and walked away to a corner of the lobby. Sitting on a bench next to a towering potted plant, Mike called his parent’s house phone, only to hear the buzzing tone he knew indicated the landlines were down. He cursed the phone company. It was a frequent occurrence for his parent’s rural town during heavy snows, which was the only reason he had even gotten his mother to get mobile phones for herself and his father. He tried their mobile phones again, but was bounced to voicemail.
He replied to his mother’s email, and sat on the bench. The receptionist smiled at him, and he wanly smiled back, and then avoided looking at the counter again. He waited ten minutes for a response, phone in a sweaty death grip. His mother never answered him. The odds were good that Internet access was out if the phone lines were out too. He was confused. How had she sent the latest email to him?
At last Mike trudged reluctantly back to the car, and settled in for the drive to Boscobel. He couldn’t imagine what the hell had inspired his mother to tell him to fly into Madison if there was no record of them at the hospital. He played out different options in his mind. He had wondered again if his mother had gotten the hospital wrong. If they had been at a different hospital, and that other hospital had released his father, it was conceivable that they could be home already. But why would his parents have gone all the way to Madison unless the heart attack was quite serious? He turned on his blinker and merged onto the highway.
Mike felt emotionally wrung out from hours of concern over his dad, and physically tired from flying all morning. Then he drove almost four grueling hours with no tire chains in a snowstorm that threatened to shut down the highway. When he finally arrived at his parents’ driveway, he released his aching hands from the steering wheel and closed his eyes for a minute.
Then he opened the car door and stepped out into a foot of snow. The house was already decorated with Christmas lights, and smoke rose from the chimney. He walked up the path to the house feeling the snow leaking into his sneakers, and rang the doorbell.
His mother opened the front door a few seconds later, her face turning to an expression of total shock. What was he doing there a week early, and in a blizzard of all things, and come in of course. His mother’s words came out tumbling all over each other.
Then he suddenly found himself standing in his parent’s living room. The Christmas tree was up already, and a fire blazed in the background. His mother wore a dress, and had an apron on, just as she always did. His father came up wearing a wool sweater, giving him a rough hug. Mike was so glad to see his father feeling healthy and hale, he started crying.
“What is going on?” his mother finally asked. “You aren’t supposed to be here until next week. Why the crying?”
Mike pulled out his phone. “Mom, I got this email from you saying that Dad was in the hospital with a heart attack. It said to fly out right away. I’ve been traveling since 5 am.”
“I haven’t sent no such thing. My God son, how worried you must have been.” She rubbed his arm with one hand, and pushed him into the room with the other.
“So Dad’s fine? There was no heart attack?”
“No, of course not. If your father had a heart attack, do you think I’d send you an email? I’d call you, of course.” She frowned at him, and gave the phone Mike still held in his hand an even darker look. “I don’t know what that is, but I didn’t send it.”
Mike stood in the middle of the living room speechless.
“Come on then, don’t just stand there. Come in the kitchen with me.” She bustled toward the kitchen, somehow pushing and pulling him simultaneously until he found himself in the kitchen. “I don’t know if this is a late lunch, or an early dinner, but I just can’t welcome you home properly without a meal.”
There was bratwurst of course, and mashed potatoes, and after dinner his mother pulled out a warm kringle from somewhere. Trust his mother to make all his favorites, and with less apparent effort than Mike exerted making himself spaghetti. Not for the first time, he wondered how his mother did it.
Then they ate and then sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee, and reminiscing. Mike looked around at his parents’ dining room, the wood and glass china cabinet looking unchanged since he was a teenager. During one of his father’s stories about getting stuck on a rural dirt road with a couple of his lodge buddies, Mike started thinking about the emails again. He abruptly thought about what David had told him about turning on ELOPe.
It had been in David’s kitchen, just last night. David admitted that he had turned on ELOPe to help get support for the servers they needed. They toasted the success of the project, how persuasive ELOPe had been. But what exactly had David done?
Was there some chance that ELOPe could have sent the emails? Chills raised the hair on the back of Mike’s neck as he thought about it. The idea seemed preposterous. Was ELOPe sending spurious emails to everyone with an AvoMail account? Surely that would have been noticed. The alternative was even more shocking, that somehow ELOPe would have intentionally targeted him. Why would it send him on a wild goose chase halfway across the country to a land-locked town with downed phone lines and lousy cell phone service?
Mike had meant the question as a joke to himself, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized just how out of touch he was. He palmed his phone, which still had no signal, desperately wanting to log into Avogadro’s network so he could verify the log files, and lacking that, to talk to David to find out in detail just what he had done.
He looked up to see his parents staring at him, his mother with a little frown for him taking out his phone at the table. He apologized, and asked to borrow his parent’s house phone just to find that indeed, the lines were out. That meant no internet service, either. And there was no mobile phone signal.
Pacing back and forth in the privacy of the kitchen, Mike thought about the design of ELOPe. The intended real-world use of ELOPe would be to offer language optimization suggestions to the Avogadro’s AvoMail customers. But in fact, the suggestions could be automated — there was code in there to do just that. In fact, they had used the automated suggestions during their human factors testing to automatically modify preexisting emails. Not only had the human factors testing shown that the recipients preferred the emails modified by ELOPe substantially, they
