Cash crisis in the frozen north

One of my most exciting jobs was working as a network engineer in the far Canadian north. It was pretty rough up there! Many of the villages were accessible only by small aircraft, and when your plane landed, the Mounties would search you and confiscate any alcohol. When people got hold of a drink, they went crazy.

Still, the fly-in villages were safer than the drive-in villages, because any town that had a road to it also had a liquor store and a couple of bars. The Mounties in these villages warned me never to stop for anyone along the road. One guy told me that if people tried to block my passage, I should run them over. I think he was kidding.

One day my boss sent me up to one of those remote drive-in outposts (let’s call it “Bolden”) on an emergency assignment. There was some sort of problem at the local bank. Nobody was sure what was wrong, but it seemed to be a network issue; so I was the man. I had been to Bolden before; it was so rough that all the buildings were caged, and the hotel would lock you in at night for your safety. One time I walked out in the morning to find the snow covered in blood from some brawl.

My job was to get the computer at the tiny “Maple Leaf Bank” back on the network so people could get paid at the end of the shift on Friday. It was too dangerous for the canning company and oil rigging outfits to keep large amounts of cash on hand. Instead, paychecks were deposited automatically in the central Maple Leaf branch in Whitehorse, and workers got their cash from the single, solitary ATM in Bolden. Late Wednesday night that ATM (and its host computer) had gone off the network.

I arrived early Friday morning, after a seven-hour drive. The bank manager warned me that if the ATM wasn’t working by 5 p.m. (so people could hit the bars), I might not make it out of town alive. I saw several large, ugly guys hovering around the ATM, so I figured it might be true.

I went to work on the computer, which was totally inundated with spyware, and (surprise!) used proprietary software I had never seen before to connect with the servers in Whitehorse. It took several hours just to get a network connection. But eventually, everything on the computer side seemed to check out fine.

Then I realized the problem: The ATM wasn’t handshaking with the computer. This was major bad news. I’m a network guy; I know virtually nothing about ATMs. I couldn’t even figure out how to turn the ATM off. But it was almost 4 p.m., and an ominous crowd was growing.

I had driven all night to get to Bolden, and by now everything was starting to blur. Fortunately, the bank’s techies in Whitehorse were helpful, and miraculously I managed to get the ATM back online just after 5 o’clock.

I was staggering back to the hotel when a shady-looking character grabbed hold of my arm. I started to yell for help, until I saw his grin. “Hey, man,” he said, “you did great! My wife would have killed me if I came home without groceries tonight. I’m buyin’ you a drink.”

That night, when they locked down the hotel, I didn’t care. The Pipeline Bar was just as warm and twice as friendly.