Book of Numbers

But it is not our intention to survey the history of subcontinental customer service.

Not that the topic is ungermane or uncur.

Now, 1988. Out of Santa Cruz nowhere, Paz—this business that before this could not get arrested, that could not even get picked up on radar—a

But whether they did or not, and they did not, this was marketing genius. The competition was saying, “Works with any device.” Paz said, “Works with every device.” The competition was saying, “Generic.” Paz said, “Universal.” Though as like any tech can tell you, there is nothing more frustrating, nothing more generic, than the universal.

Paz, having been late to the party, reinvented the party by spi

A good artist ships. A great artist lies about shipping and no one notices. Paz even made a TV commercial, what better way to target their audience, which aired in select markets in central California. The remote used in the spot was a dummy, just a plastic prop, and so each TV in it had to be controlled by its own remote operated out of frame.

It was with this commercial that Paz shifted their businessmodel from hype to fraud: they a

Basically, the original recipe Paz product, we forget what it was called, was billed as like not just programmable but easily programmable, capable of storing up to 10 favorite cha

At the time a cruft of Paz engineers used to hang out at Kompfs in Su

To compensate for having failed to do a thing as like negligible and yet u

Now this was entertainment. Taking an antique coil toaster and electric kettle and slapping sensors on them only so that toast and hot water might be made with a click from across the room. Just for the fun of it, or the consolation. But then, as like always happens, the hobby hypertrophied, with the engineers proceeding to attempt the same hack with nonelectric devices. Forget digital vs. analog. Mechanical. Machinal. To remotely control a pedal sewingmachine from Podolsk or a Kashmiri abacus required motorization.

There was a clock there, at Kompfs, something European, we would not know which make exactly. An archaic dusty clock that had stood throughout its grandparenthood until fashions changed and its coffinsize casement was axed for firewood and the mechanism with all its gears was taken out and pi

Whatever interval separated their meetings is a mystery to us, but when the Paz engineers returned, whenever they returned, they were shocked.

Not only had the clock been outfitted with a motor triggered by sensor that was controlled by the Power of the Zenith TV remote, but the Cha

The Paz engineers, who had assumed this clock mod would take days or even weeks, asked Kompf who was responsible and were answered the guy who had been browsing in the back while they had been discussing the challenge.

None of them had registered his presence and Kompf though this is not surprising could not even remember his name, could only describe him against type. An Indopak, but unshaven, untucked, and maloccluded as like he was gri

Kompf, whose nationality was a German accent though we have never been able to decide if he was also a Jew, was universally recognized at least on the newsgroup he moderated, genysym.grimoire, as like the expert authority on defunct tech, and discredited alternative energies. He blogged treatises on the wunderwaffen and the remotecontrolled but not unma

The Paz engineers asked how to get in touch with the guy and Kompf said the guy had told him that either he had just turned down a job or been turned down for a job at Raytheon. The engineers asked around but nobody at Raytheon would admit to not being able to differentiate among their myriad subcontinentals, and in that viro, the engineer hab, for someone capable of such leisure robotics to be essentially anonymous was so preposterous that the Pazzers suspected that the guy they were after did not exist and that Kompf was just pranking them, or involving them in some elaborate scavenger hunt whose rules they did not understand.

But then one night or we are just imagining night one of the engineers, a Gregory Rundle L E or Rundel E L, who before Paz had worked at Samsung and after Paz would work at Samsung but demotedly, got a call from Kompf, at the office or home the same, “Your guy just came and went all flustered, requesting a recommendation letter.”