Suspended feet
I sat in my office and stared at my laptop. If the office had been dark, the blue images from the laptop screen would’ve played over my face as I flashed through websites. If I smoked, there would’ve been a lazy trail of white spiraling above my head. And while I was imagining, I suppose if I was rich, I wouldn’t have been so hungry. But it wasn’t, I didn’t, and I never would be.
Sometimes the trickiest part of life is just finding out how dinner goes from sitting on the store shelf to inside my mouth. It often takes longer than I’d like.
Then the dinner bell rang: the door to my office flew open and bounced noisily against the wall.
“Mr. Manny! Dev Manny!”
I chose not to react to the door. I find that when I remain collected, a frantic client will tend to emulate this mood. Hopefully it would work here. My door hinges couldn’t take more hard slams.
I looked at my potential source of inbound food. I recognized him.
“Neil? T. Neil Cdooga, right?”
“Close, Mr. Manny. That’s ‘Cdooga’ with a silent ‘C’. And call me Neil.”
“Call me Dev.”
He looked the same as when I saw him last: dressed sharp, with his slender body clothed in branded fashions I couldn’t even pronounce. A Blackberry dangled on a belt clip, politely reminding the world that this man carried a Blackberry, and he wanted you to know about it. One thing that didn’t match his outfit was a terribly dirty and frayed backpack slung over one shoulder. I could barely make out the ‘Black Diamond’ name and logo along one side. He saw my glance. He smiled.
“I’ve got an interesting case for you, Dev. You were such a great help last time. This particular case needs your expertise.”
I stared at the backpack. ”I’d like the full scoop before I commit.”
He unzipped the backpack. He pulled out a very uncomfortable-looking climbing harness. All black nylon and metal and full of straps and cinches. Various metal things dangled with an inanimate menace.
“Hold on a minute,” I said. “I don’t like heights. Or anything involving them.”
“You’ll be fine.”
Neil wrenched out a climbing helmet. It was covered in stickers, most of them depicting physical acts best suited to Tarzan, not me. He thunked the helmet on my desk. I swallowed.
“I don’t think I’m interested in this case.”
Suddenly, T. Neil Cdooga leaned down in front of me, knuckles stabbing my desk. The open backpack crashed to the floor. He angled closer, his eyes large and drilling into mine. I could smell his breath: Powerbar. Chocolate.
“You will be intertested, Dev. I promise.”
I took a moment to ponder what would be worse, hanging a hundred feet in the air while suspended by a single 10 millimeter-wide rope… or not having dinner that night.
“Cash up front, Neil. Call it hazard pay.”
“Let’s go.”
Neil drove while he explained his problem.
“I’m taking us to Sherpa Solutions’ outdoor rock climbing station. We’re going to ‘Saliente Grande’. It’s a small cliff face that we use for our top-rope training classes.”
“So when you say ‘small’, you mean what exactly?”
“It’s 100 feet tall.”
“Oh, good.”
“No, don’t worry. I’ll be watching from the bottom.”
“Oh, good.”
As my fear of heights reminded me it was there, Neil explained the problem.
“We’ve got two employees who run the training. John Gale and Deanna Potter. One part of the training is a relay race: John and Deanna’s teams climb the cliff. Each climber has to touch the top then come back down. The times are compared and the winning team – the fastest – gets a cash prize. The winning team’s leader also gets a paycheck bonus.
“I think one of the teams is cheating. But I don’t know how.”
“Cheating? At climbing?”
“Yeah. At one point, the climb gets really hard and slow. You could easily skip this section by veering way off course, to the far left or right. But that’s not allowed. You’ve got to go through the hard stuff before you get to the top. And they do.”
“You see them do this?”
“Visually? No. I’m at the office. Whoever’s climbing the wall clips this to their harness.”
Neil tossed me a small black box. It had a worn nylon loop on one end. The device was a scuffed, rugged-looking little thing. It had a recessed power switch, an LED, and a USB slot for a computer interface.
“It’s a GPS and barometric altimeter. Climbers wear it during the race. Then we can take it, plug it into a computer and see exactly where they were climbing, how high, and how fast. It’s an expensive unit, and very precise.”
“Seems simple enough.”
“It is. But it’s malfunctioning. I think John’s or Deanna’s group is cheating by skipping the hard section of the climb. Instead, they’re climbing way off to the side and around it. Saves them time on their climb, and they don’t have to work as hard. And that also gives them an edge over everyone else.”
“And since no one’s copping to the crime, you want me to find out who’s cheating.”
“Yes. And tell me how they’re doing it, so I can stop it!”
I had an inkling of what could be happening. But I needed to know more about the situation. I needed to climb the wall.
That, two hours later, is how I found myself dangling a hundred feet in the air while suspended by a single rope. And maybe it wasn’t as hazardous as I’d thought: the rope was more than 10 millimeters thick. It was 11.
Luckily, Neil didn’t insist on me performing the climb exactly as his professionals did. I climbed up and down, feet scrabbling, legs shaking and forearms burning. I moved to the far right and left. Then I stopped, noted the time and did the same thing again.
An hour later, I was off the wall and back in my comfort zone: Earthbound. Neil and I went back to his office and to his computer. We plugged in the GPS and were analyzing the data. My climbing for twenty minutes had produced almost four hundred rows of information, with columns of altitude, latitude and longitude.
“Okay,” Neil said, his finger tickling the screen. “We know you made two climbs. And you went up to the same point and swung right and left to the same point each time. And… well… shoot-a-monkey-with-a-bell-on-it!”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m amazed. You made two climbs, but the GPS says that only on the first climb you swung off to the side. The second climb has you climbing straight up and straight down. But that’s not possible – I saw you move way off to the side! Both climbs were identical. How could the GPS show different data for each?”
“That was me testing my theory, Neil. Looks like I was right. Call in the climbers, would you? I’d like to talk to them.”
Within minutes, Deanna Potter and John Gale stood in front of me. The two athletes were skinny, tall, full of lean muscle mass, had zero body fat, and were cheerful and happy. That is, they were my exact opposite.
“Neil’s told me his problem. He can’t afford to watch you guys climb, but needs to know that when you say you’re climbing a particular route, you’re actually doing it.”
“Sure, man,” Gale said. “That’s why we got the boxes.”
“The boxes?”
“Yeah. Those things.” He gestured to the two GPS units I had in my hand. “Me and Potter are both clueless about stuff like this. Luckily, they just work. All we do is clip them on our belts and forget about them.”
“Righto,” Potter said, smiling. “Simple.”
She looked to Neil and raised a Spock-like eyebrow. ”What’s going on, Neil?”
“Just let Mr. Manny talk.”
Neil’s face was like the 100-foot wall I’d recently tried to climb. Cold and hard.
“Thanks, Neil. I’ll get to the detail in a minute. First, I want a quick equipment check. Each of you take these.” I handed a GPS unit to each climber.
“Okay. Clip them on like you’re about to start your climb.”
They clipped the small boxes to one of the many carabiners hanging from their climbing harnesses. Gale looked down and switched his GPS device on.
“Right,” I nodded. “So you run your climb. Up and down. You work through your day, and go and kick back with a Gatorade. Take off your equipment.”
They did. Potter and Gale stripped off their climbing gear and handed me back the GPS units. Potter seemed to have more gear than Gale. It caused her to fumble a little.
“Why all the extra toys?”
She laughed. “Just paranoid, probably. Chalk, ‘beaners, webbing… I like to have extras handy in case anyone needs something.”
Neil had been silent throughout this display, watching with half-closed eyes. They opened fully when I turned towards him and nodded.
“I’m all set.”
“Deanna, John, thanks. You can take off. See you next week.”
The climbers left the room.
“You might only want to see one of them next week, Neil. The other one is cheating.”
“Impossible.”
I’d heard that line before.
He was still shaking his head. “I don’t get it. How can a GPS be wrong?”
“It isn’t. Even though manufacturers won’t promise it, they’re usually accurate to within a few feet. The question is, how can a user make a GPS show the wrong information?”
Neil shoved back from his desk, ran an exasperated hand through uncaring hair, and stared at me.
“How? How do you make a GPS cheat? And who’s doing it?”
“You know what the kicker is, Neil? I don’t think we needed the climbers in here. We could’ve just looked at the data.”
“But… then why-”
“It’s what I do. I watch people and processes. People are no different than a complex computer. Give them a prompt and they’ll respond a different way, depending on their situation. You saw what I did?”
“Yeah. You handed them the GPS boxes and had them take off their equipment.”
“Right. But this is what I handed them.”
I tossed a GPS to Neil. He caught it with one hand as he continued to stare at me.
“So?”
“Notice anything about it?”
Neil glanced down and flipped the small box over in his hand.
“It’s turned on.”
“I just did that. That’s Deanna Potter’s. This one,” I held up the other GPS, “is John Gale’s. You’ll notice it’s turned off.”
“So?”
“John said he and Deanna weren’t comfortable using these. That they just clipped the devices to their belt and climbed. But John was alert enough to know the device was off when I gave it to him. He turned it on, then off before he handed it back.”
“Again, I can’t help but restate: So?”
“John’s more aware of changes to the device and is also more comfortable in turning it on and off. He’s the one who’s cheating.”
“What? Imposs…”
This time, Neil interrupted himself. I watched his face move from confusion to comprehension. He saw the link. I let him process, then continued.
“That’s right. John Gale starts to climb, but then turns the GPS off before he gets to the hard part. He skirts off to the side, around the tough spot, then back to the regular course. Then he turns the GPS back on. To improve the relay time for the whole team, he might even show some students how to do the same thing.”
Neil was nodding eagerly.
“And so… to the GPS, it would look like he’s climbing in a straight line. With no movement to the right or left. Because the GPS was turned off at that point!”
“You got it. And the fact that John knew to turn the GPS on and off – when Deanna didn’t – was the giveaway. That told me he knew when the device was ‘watching’ him.”
“Amazing. Amazing! We got him! …or not. All we really have is his word against ours, Dev. How can I prove this?”
“Easy.” I poked a finger towards his computer. ”You’ve got all climbs logged. Compare the climbs between Potter and Gale. Those GPS units report their locations on a regular interval. Something like every three seconds, you get a timestamp. Show John that information. Show John the part of the data where he makes his climb. When he cheats by turning off the GPS, his climb will have missing time – just a minute or two, but it’s there. Ask him to explain why only his climbs have missing time at the same place on the wall – when Deanna’s has data with regular time stamps every few seconds.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“I agree.”
“I think we’re done here, Dev. Let me get you back to your office.”
Although my fear of heights was particularly active during this case, I still felt good. Good enough to hope that future cases might be as easy and entertaining.
Thinking about it later, I realized even one out of two would be fine. Easy OR entertaining would still rock me to sleep at night. But I was wrong on both points.
Very wrong.
