Time for better screening of employees. The exceptionally un-child-friendly programming is purposely done by someone, and it is not at all funny. I’ll wager that it will be very hard to track down, though personally, I hope they put real effort into finding and dealing with whoever is behind it. Terrorizing children (and their families) is just not funny.
Either you’re assuming a lot from the story Tyler posted, or you’re getting
more information from another source (in which case, I would like to read
that, too if you have a link).
The fact that this happened after a change of batteries (which probably
caused a system reboot) and that only one phrase (“Kill James”) seems
to be threatening, suggests to me that this is an innocent malfunction. The
doll uses a computer connection to change its voice data so that the child’s
name is included in the phrases. This means that file pointers will be
dynamically changed to point to the new phrases. Pointers are something
that are always screwed up by programmers. So if Elmo used to utter
something like “I’m real, James!” And the pointer was changed during the
reboot to point in the middle of the file that said “I’m real”, that could easily
be interpreted by a human litener as “Kill, James!” (when you clip a sound
file in the middle of a vowel, it will often sound like a consanant).
I’m more inclined to believe that this is a Quality Assurance problem rather
than an intentional prank. Some poor QA person probably will get fired,
though.
Remember Hanlon’s Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be
adequately explained by stupidity. "
Either that, or the batteries were changed improperly causing something like a power surge or an arc that corrupted part of the memory, making a phrase that was formerly innocuous into Kill James…
Speaking of talking toys, remember “Furby”? They were designed to respond to certain negative stimuli, such as being picked up abruptly, turned over or shaken, as well as to more positive stimuli, such as being stroked or cuddled. Well, one day, when Johanna was about seven, she left her Furby on the coffee table. Our dog Cedar couldn’t resist…he grabbed poor Furby and started running around the room with him…shaking him, dropping him, pawing at him, etc. The whole time, Furby was shouting “Oh no! Me no like! Me no health!” We were laughing so hard, it was a good 10 minutes before we regained enough composure to rescue poor Furby from the dog!
This page has a video from a news report on the story, where you can
hear Elmo say the offending phrase. It sounds more like “Kell? James?”
(Maybe it switched to French: “Quel, James?”)
No, just distracted and interrupted several times and didn’t get to continue my though process (such as it is)… having personally heard the far less than child friendly, and no way just battery glitch induced nastiness in the TelleTubby doll a few years back, I was going on the idea that this was quite likely similar… purposeful programming. I hope to heck I’m wrong about that.
