About 22 years ago, when I got married, I needed a copy of my birth certificate...

About 22 years ago, when I got married, I needed a copy of my birth certificate for the Portuguese government to keep. That’s all done at the municipal level in Canada, and you have to go in person to get it.

My city had just finished digitalising everything and burning the physical copies, when thought it would be a good idea to fire the IT architect who had been hired to design and build the infrastructure.

He had a dead man switch built into the system that locked the encrypted files if he didn’t log in for some time.

It took 6 months to get everything working again. I suspect it involved a large sum paid to the architect.