Poing Gostal

So a while ago, around The Fifth Elephant or The Thief Of Time, I kinda fell of the Terry Pratchett bus. I don't know why, but it happened. Anyway, I picked up Going Postal on Saturday afternoon, and I'm almost finished it, it's great, and I think I'm probably going to get completely caught up over the next few weeks.

So in Going Postal, there are "the clacks", a sort of automated telegraph, it's a new high speed communication technology that was started by academics and engineers and is now being taken over by corporate interests who are sacrificing the health and usefulness of the network for their own greed and business interests. Man, it's a good thing we don't have anything like that in our world.

'[...] I think someone's found a way of sending messages that can damage a tower, sir.'
'That's impossi--'
Mr. Pony's hand slapped the table. 'How come you know so much, sir? Did you sit up half the night trying to get to the bottom of it? Have you taken a differential drum apart with a tin opener? Did you spot how the swage armature can be made to jump off the elliptical bearing if you hit the letter K and then send it to a tower with an address higher than yours, but only if you hit the letter Q first and the drum spring is fully wound? Did you spot that the key levers wedge together and the spring forces the arm up and you're looking at a gearbox full of theeth? Well, I did!'
[...]
'But somebody in a tower must press the keys that do all these... terrible things,' said Stowley.
Pony sighed. They never took an interest. It was just money. They didn't know how anything worked. And then suddenly they needed to know, and you had to use baby talk.