The Daily Parker

When a software company engages with an offshore technical support team, they signal to the world that they have little interest in supporting their users. Offshore teams have no incentive to actually solve problems. In fact, individual tech support reps get punished for independent thought in some organizations. So if you have a support issue that they can't find in the support manual (even if you send them a link to the exact community page that explains the issue and solution), they won't help.

Electronic Arts, the legal successor to Maxis for all things SimCity, has an offshore tech support team that has, I believe, completely given up on solving my problem. That it took as many emails as it did before they finally asked me to do something impossible only adds to the farce.

I got this message this morning:

Thank you for contacting EA Help. My name is Krishna and I would assist you with your Origin issue today.

I would suggest please contact your retailer they will help out this issue.

Krishna, the most likely case is that I am contacting the retailer. My reply:

I actually don’t remember where I bought the software, because I bought it 18 years ago. I thought it was Egghead, but they went bankrupt in 2001. So I probably bought it directly from Maxis. EA bought Maxis in 2015. So, really, I bought it directly from the company you represent.

Once more, with feeling: I have a license for SimCity 4 that I obtained in 2003. The software does not work on any Windows platform after Vista because Maxis made an engineering choice that turned out to be wrong. Flash forward to 2021, and the only way I can use the software today is through Origin. I therefore need to download the software using Origin, and then activate it, which requires a code.

Is it possible to escalate this to someone with the authority to solve this very simple problem?

I believe EA has now burned about 4-5x the value of the activation code avoiding giving me the activation code. As a 25-year veteran of software development, I can say this exactly the outcome I would predict from an offshore tech support operation.

So, I'll probably just give EA $20 for a new license, while continuing to ridicule them on social media.

Maxis died in 2015 and made Electronic Arts king of SimCity. When I recently found a copy of SimCity 4, one of the only computer games I've ever played long enough to get good at, I thought I might waste an hour or two on a rainy Sunday playing it.

Unfortunately, the CD requires a copy-protection feature in Windows Vista that Windows 7 dropped because researchers discovered a massive security flaw in it. The CD, therefore, will only work on Windows Vista or Windows XP, neither of which I have run since 2007. So I combed through tech support articles Electronic Arts published on the issue (both of them) and found that EA can provide a key to run the product on Origin, its portable game engine.

Here is the conversation I had with EA tech support. I'm including the names provided by the tech reps only because it became an issue that a new person replied to each of my replies.

Sunday 2 May 2021, 13:25 CDT

Subject: Ancient SimCity 4 CD-ROM + new Origin install = need support to activate

Message: Hi! I recently found a SimCity 4 CD that I bought when it came out. There's a known incompatibility with Windows 10, so it won't play anymore. But I found this support article that says you can send me a code for the downloadable version on Origin. What do you need from me to send a code?

Monday 3 May 2021, 01:06 CDT

Hello David Braverman,

Thank you for contacting EA Help. This is Krishna, following up on your case of Origin.

I can see that you are concerned about your SimCity 4 game code.

Please do not worry, I will certainly help you with this issue.

In order to investigate it further, we'll need to verify your account ownership. And to do the same, I've just sent you an email with a 6 digit verification code in it.

Please copy that code here to verify account ownership.

I patiently await your response.

You can also find answers to common questions on our Help Center at http://help.ea.com, or ask our community experts by visiting Answer HQ at http://answers.ea.com.

Thank you once again for contacting EA Help! Stay safe!

Still need help? You can reach us on help.ea.com .

Krishna K.
EA Help

Monday 3 May 2021 19:07 CDT

Here you go: {code}

Tuesday 4 May 2021, 06:14 CDT

Hello David Braverman,
Thank you for contacting EA help. My name is Rahul and I would assist you with your issue today in Origin.

I see you have a CD for SimCity 4 and you are unable to run it on your system and looking for it to be installed in a digital form or on the Origin account.

To help you further, we need game code written over the CD or game manual.

Awaiting your response. Thanks!

Still need help? You can reach us on help.ea.com .

Rahul K.
EA Help

Tuesday 4 May 2021, 08:22 CDT

Hi, Rahul,

The code is: {code}

Thanks!

Wednesday 5 May 2021, 01:51 CDT

Hello David Braverman,
Thank you for contacting EA help. My name is Maria and I would assist you with your issue today in Origin.

I see you have a CD for SimCity 4 and you are unable to run it on your system and looking for it to be installed in a digital form or on the Origin account.

Thank you for sharing the code for the game, however, may I know from where did you purchase the game as the shared code is not for the origin and The SimCity 4.

Awaiting your response. Thanks!

Still need help? You can reach us on help.ea.com .

Maria S.
EA Help

Wednesday 5 May 2021, 08:28 CDT

This is getting silly.

It’s an original CD from 2003, so I probably purchased it from an Egghead Software store in Chicago. In 2003. 18 years ago.

Thursday 6 May 2021, 05:53 CDT

Hello David Braverman,
Hi my name is Abhishek and I'm the advisor that is currently handling your case.

I see that you are facing Invalid code issue in SimCity 4. I realize its indeed disappointing. I'll certainly help you with the best possible information to help you out with this issue.

In order to help you we need to locate your account, please be sure to provide at least one of these:
- Email address linked with you EA account
- PSN ID/XBOX Gamertag
- Your Origin ID
- Code number.

I will leave your case open for 7 days waiting for an answer, after that it will be closed automatically.

Thank you for contacting EA Help today, and please feel free to reach out to us again in case you need further assistance with this issue or any further queries you might have in the future! https://help.ea.com

Still need help? You can reach us on help.ea.com .

Abhishek S.
EA Help

Thursday 6 May 2021, 08:42 CDT

This is becoming a farce.

At 24-hour intervals, I get an email from a different person who appears to have no idea why I reached out to EA support. I provide the information you ask for, and then the next day I get a new email showing a complete disregard for the email I sent the day before.

I expect the next person who emails me to have read the case file and to respond to it in any way that answers the inquiry.

All I want is a code for SimCity 4 because the CD I bought in 2003 won’t work on any computer built after 2009. I’ve provided the serial number of the CD, you have my email address because it’s the one you’ve emailed, and if you can’t find my Origin ID, that’s just sad.

My next step is a detailed blog post, naming names, with a link posted on Twitter.

Your move.

Thursday 6 May 2021, 21:23 CDT

Hello David Braverman,
Thank you for contacting EA Help. My name is Jaikish and I would assist you with your Origin issue today.

Having gone through your email, I came to know that you are having issue while login to your Ancient SimCity 4 account. I know this must be disappointing for you. please don't worry, I will certainly help you with this issue.

Please let me share that we are unable to locate the account with the provided the Code" BY7P-NHL7-M24C-4JQK-9BL6". I would request you please provide the Correct code to locate the account.

Look forward to your reply.

You can also find answers to common questions on our Help Center at "http://help.ea.com" or ask our community experts by visiting Answer HQ at "http://answers.ea.com"

Thank you for contacting EA help .

Still need help? You can reach us on help.ea.com .

Jaikish G.
EA Help

Today, 10:27 CDT

OK, since a new person reads this case file every time I reply, let me start from the top.

I have a CD-ROM that I bought in 2003. The CD-ROM has a license number on the back of the case. This has never been an Origin issue, except that an EA technical support document claimed that I can get an Origin code for Sim City 4 by showing proof that I own a copy of a Sim City 4 CD.

Here, then, is me with the copy of the CD that I own.

I have shown proof that I own a copy of a Sim City 4 CD, and I would like a code to unlock Sim City 4 on Origin, please. Thank you.

And here we are.

You know what? They might win this round. The current version of SimCity, released in 2013, costs $20—a lot less than my bill rate would have been for all these messages. So Krishna, Rahul, Maria, Abhishek, and Jaikish, having mustered the very best example of obstructionism that a company with overseas tech support can muster, may get me to spend the $20 after all.

But I still want my copy of SimCity 4, dammit!

May 5th has some history, and not just about a relatively minor battle in Mexico that most Mexicans don't even remember.

For example, two hundred years ago today, Napoleon died and The Guardian was born. I never knew about that coincidence. TIL.

And this morning, Facebook's Oversight Board upheld the social-media company's ban on the XPOTUS, at least for the next six months.

Also TIL that my main programming language, C#, commands 7% of the Internet's mind-share, making it the 4th most-popular programming language. Python, at 30%, is the most popular, because its ease of use (and ease of writing the most godawful spaghetti code imaginable) makes it the preferred language of non-programmers.

I'm glad to see that one of my most-hated languages, Scala, continues its plummet, now even less popular than Visual Basic and and VBA, two languages that should have died during the GWB presidency.

Over the weekend, I stooped down to give Cassie some pats while she slept on her bed in my office, and realized I had a cache of turn-of-the-century computer games on a lower shelf. Among them I found SimCity 4, from 2003.

It turns out that SimCity 4, like many games from that era, relies on a thing called "SecuROM" which turned out to have sufficient security problems of its own that Microsoft decided not to support it in Windows 10. I didn't know this until I started researching why the game just...didn't work. When you find a support article that says "96 people have reported this problem" you at least know you're not alone.

So, following the advice in the support article, I opened a support case with Electronic Arts. We are now on a 24-hour cycle of them asking me to send back auto-generated codes to prove I'm an actual person with an actual copy of the SimCity 4 CD. This, after it took three rounds with their automated systems to set up a support account. The merry-go-round with their automated systems was irritating, but the 24-hour cycle time between emails just makes me laugh. I haven't actually taken the time 

After all that, I may actually play SimCity for the first time in 17 years at some point this month. I can't wait to see how a game designed for Pentium 4 processors and 256 MB of RAM performs on a Xeon 6C with 40 GB available...

Today is not only the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, it's also the 84th anniversary of the Nazi bombing of Guernica. Happy days, happy days.

In today's news, however:

• The European Union has announced it will allow fully-vaccinated travelers from the US to visit starting this summer.
• Chuck Geschke, who invented the portable document format (PDF) that we all know and love, died last week.
• The FAA revoked all of the certificates held by a 79-year-old flight instructor and aviation columnist after she (a) flew under a bridge and (b) allegedly turned off her transponder to hide this fact. Oopsi.
• Bruce Schneier starts his latest column with: "If you don’t have enough to worry about already, consider a world where AIs are hackers."
• Texas prosecutors dropped the felony embezzlement charge against a woman who had failed to return a VHS copy of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" to her local video store...in 1999.
• Chicago city attorneys have sued a northwest Indiana gun store for being the source of dozens of firearms used by criminals in Chicago.

I will now get lunch. And since it's 17°C right now (as opposed to yesterday's 5°C), I may eat it outside.

I've just made a change to the side project I'm working on that will reduce my database costs about 94%. Maybe 96%. This is only in the dev/test environment, so it may make less of a difference in production, but still... Sometimes taking something out of your code can make an enormous difference.

I promise I'll write a lot about what I've been working on once it launches.

Happy 51st Earth Day! In honor of that, today's first story has nothing to do with Earth:

• The MOXIE experiment on NASA's Perseverance rover produced 5.4 grams of oxygen in an hour on Mars, not enough to sustain human life but a major milestone in our efforts to visit the planet.
• Back on earth, the Nature Conservancy has released a report predicting significant climate changes for Illinois, including a potential 5°C temperature rise by 2100.
• Microsoft has teamed up with the UK Meteorological Office (AKA "the Met") to provide HPE Cray EX supercomputers capable of 60 petaflops and storing 4 exabytes of data.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has begun running brand-new, Chicago-built rail cars on the Blue Line, which runs from O'Hare Airport through the Loop and out to Oak Park.
• Guthries Tavern, a Chicago institution since the 1930s that closed because of the pandemic, will reopen under new ownership.
• Are you feeling blah in the late-stage pandemic? You could be languishing.
• Via Bruce Schneier, the New Yorker explains how North Korea has created an army of cyber thieves.

Finally, it looks like I'll have some really cool news to share about my own software in just a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

The United States Postal Service has a surveillance program that tracks social media posts for law enforcement, and no one can say why:

The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.

“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”

When contacted by Yahoo News, civil liberties experts expressed alarm at the post office’s surveillance program. “It’s a mystery,” said University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, whom President Barack Obama appointed to review the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks. “I don’t understand why the government would go to the Postal Service for examining the internet for security issues.”

I mean, scraping social media takes only a modicum of technical skills. In the last year I've written software that can scan Twitter and run detailed sentiment analysis on keyword-based searches. But I'm not a government agency with arrest powers. Or, you know, a constitutional mandate to deliver the mail.

Weird.

Just a quick note: I'm halfway to the "20 years from now" I mentioned in this post from 13 April 2011. And as I'm engaged in two software projects right now—one for work, one for me—that have me re-thinking all of the application design skills I learned in the 10 years leading up to that 2011 post, I can only hope that I'm not walking down a technological cul-de-sac the way Data General did in 1978.

Bit of a frustrating day, today. I spent 2½ hours trying to deploy an Azure function using the Az package in PowerShell, before giving up and going back to the AzureCLI. All of this to confirm a massive performance issue that I suspected but needed to see in a setting that eliminated network throughput as a possible factor. Yep: running everything completely within Azure sped it up by 11%, meaning an architecture choice I made a long time ago is definitely the problem. I factored the code well enough that I can replace the offending structure with a faster one in a couple of hours, but it's a springtime Sunday, so I don't really feel totally motivated right now to do so.

Lest you worry I have neglected other responsibilities, Cassie already got over an hour of walks and dog park time today, bringing her up to 10½ hours for the week. I plan to take her on another 45-minute walk in an hour or so. Last week she got almost 14 hours of walks, however. I blame the mid-week rain we got.

I also have a 30-minute task that will involve 15 minutes of setup, 10 minutes of tear-down, and 5 minutes of video recording. I will be so relieved next fall when all of our chorus work happens in person again.

Before I do that, however, I'm going to go hug my dog.