Dial E For Murder

No, it’s not M. It’s E, baby. E is the true letter to dial for murder.

I work in a security-related field, and as such I have need for encryption in various situations. If you don’t already know what it is, encryption is a term for technologies that scramble information so that it is unreasonably difficult for someone to read unless they are authorized to do so. If someone who isn’t supposed to wants to read encrypted data, they had better have a lot of expertise, a large number of computers, and be in no rush.

Since encryption is so great at protecting information from prying eyes, people in my industry start to use it for the really important things first. When exchanging critical financial data with a client, for example. But then we start using it for less critical things, like placing an order for pizza, and it becomes a slippery slope all the way down. Soon, we’re using types of encryption to prove our emails to Mom really are from Sonny Boy. Like Mom’s checking.

So today I was chatting with the Boulanger, discussing encryption for our instant messaging chats. She didn’t know what it is, the poor dear. So I explained it and its purpose.

Boulanger is the sort of woman who cannot be bothered with the boring realities of certain things, most especially when there is a more entertaining alternative to discuss. No matter that it’s fictional, let’s explore it. So hearing my explanation of encryption and attempting to determine how and why it might be applied to instant message chat, she came upon the best reason ever.

“So you want to chat using encryption because you want to talk about … MURDER,” she stated. Because she is so literate that grammar literally inundates and colors her speech, you could practically hear the capitalization.

Faced with such a dangerous and tantalizing alternative reality, how could I disagree?