Begin feeling

A few years ago, the gas station near Microsoft’s main campus (the one which had been run by my colleague in a previous stage of his career) appeared to have suffered some problems with the LCD unit on one of its pumps. Instead of “Please insert card”, it said “@leace incebd cabd“. As a geek, I quickly determined that bit 4 got wiped out in the ASCII codes for the characters in the message. Undaunted, I set about going through the usual steps for purchasing gasoline, though it took a little longer than normal because I first had to decode the corrupted strings. And then after I thought I had finished all the necessary preliminaries, the panel said, “Begin Feeling”.