We start our story how all good stories should start; with deception, greed, lies and the underlining sense that the person on the other end of a phone call has no clue what they are in for. Before I started college, I worked as Technical Support for the Xbox3601. Maybe you’ve heard of it? I was the guy you would call if you had issues with online connectivity, billing, hardware malfunction, etc. I would fix it as best I could over the phone. There was something else that I got on the phones sometimes, “Phishers”2. A Phisher, as defined by FreeDictionary.com, is someone who requests confidential information over the Internet under false pretenses in order to fraudulently obtain credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal data. These people who call in trying to get me to slip up and tell them the smallest amount of information they could use to later call back and get access to the account with. This is a story of one of those incidences my friends and I have labeled “The TRON story”.
In case some people don’t know, TRON3 is a cult classic from 1982 featuring some of the first instances of computer-generated imagery, also known as “CGI”4. The movie, about a computer programmer/hacker accidently gets himself stuck in a computer world called “The Grid” and he’s forced to play gladiator like games in order to continue living, was critically panned and a box office failure, but like other stinky cheeses, aged well and picked up a strong cult following that allowed it a sequel called Tron: Legacy set for release in late 2010, which is where this story officially begins.