Werner Herzog
1990
91 minutes
This is a Werner Herzog documentary about a journalist who was imprisoned and tortured by Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the alleged cannibal dictator who ruled the Central African Republic for about ten years in the sixties and seventies. As with a lot of Herzog documentaries, they drag the poor bastard back to the scene of the crime and have him relive his terrible experiences. The journalist was accused of espionage because he was posting a report to the newspaper he worked for and while he was sending the telex the machine crapped out and produced a bunch of gibberish. The regime interpreted this gibberish as being some kind of encoded message and arrested him so they could torture and interrogate him.
You've never been through anything quite this dramatic, but you had a similar thing happen at work at one of your earlier jobs. One woman you worked with despised you for reasons that aren't entirely clear to you. You chalk it up to looking and dressing differently than other people in the office, which was strange since you rarely crossed her path enough for it to really matter. She tried on numerous occasions to get you disciplined or fired for various minor offenses. She knew you were a bit of a hacker off-the-job, which possibly added to the animosity.
One day you got a call from work that woke you up on your day off from that job--you mostly worked nights at the time. Your employer was demanding that you come in and explain yourself for a serious breach of privacy because you had allegedly hacked one of the machines in the webmaster's office where you sometimes had to use the computer to assist with the website. When you showed up, she gleefully informed you that you were going to be fired because she had caught you red-handed. She was alleging that you had written "some sort of virus" that automatically logged you into the secondary computer in that office.
You protested that you had done no such thing, but then she turned on the machine to demonstrate. The machine came up and displayed your name as the last person who had logged on before the screen blinked a few times and logged in automatically. You protested that you hadn't done this, and she began going into a rant about what a serious breach of patient privacy this was and that she was going to report this to your supervisor and get you canned. Upon examining the computer, you noticed that the chair had been pushed in all the way so that the arm of the chair was depressing the Enter key on the keyboard. This caused the computer to log in as a guest user with no password and no network access. You pointed this out to her and the webmaster. You simply pulled the chair away so it wasn't sitting on the keyboard and restarted the machine, which then behaved as expected. You told them to make sure that the chair wasn't sitting on the keyboard next time, but to feel free to call you in if they needed any further help puzzling out such issues, then charged the agency for two hours of work for coming in on your day off.
You were quite glad that this was some busybody with a minimal amount of power instead of some crazed coke-fueled paranoid dictator who literally thought he was a living god. Slightly different circumstances and you could have been imprisoned and possibly ended up in someone's stewpot.
Time to choose something different: