A Brief History of Hypothetical, Inc.

Hypothetical, Inc., is a large and ponderous company that began with nothing and has magnified that initial endowment many times. It is one of the largest companies in the world—one of the 1x10⁸ largest, to be precise—and is the largest employer in Mordechai, Kansas. Since its birth in 1987, Hypothetical, Inc., has been devoted to the production and distribution of hypotheticals. The mission statement of the company is as follows:

To make and sell the best hypotheticals anytime and for any price the buyer will pay.

In keeping with trends throughout the economy, Hypothetical, Inc., has recently been in transition, and now the strategic focus of the company is to align itself such that a hypothetical is regarded not as a product but rather as a service. This seemingly innocuous change has brought forth severe and extreme measures with regard to implementation, and the tumultuous consequences of those measures have resulted in low employee morale and increased theft of petty business supplies.

A morale committee, consisting of the president, the vice president, the chief of operations, and the president's nephew (who is working in the mail room), analyzed the state of dissatisfaction and agreed the company's longstanding no-computer policy must end. The committee members, some of whom had gained their skills within the public sector, voted immediately to purchase a bulk lot of 1,000 assorted computers at a volume discount, assuming that any disparities of system or hardware would be resolved later.

They placed the 1,000 computers on desktops and countertops and in break rooms and boardrooms throughout the company and wired them together with whatever transmission media they could make fit with the assorted adapter ports. To their astonishment, the network's performance was not within a window of acceptability. In fact, the network did not perform at all, and the search began for someone to blame.