It’s an engineering allegory, not a literal historic account. You’re supposed to learn from the engineer who diligently takes notes until they discover the obscure correlation that clues them in to the real problem. The true problem is not always what we assume it to be, but you can’t dismiss the existence of a problem because it seems unlikely.

The included details of the narrative are deliberately fanciful to make it obvious that it’s not intended to be taken literally.

Of all the details people are trying to pick apart, I’m surprised nobody mentioned how strange it was that they drove to the store every single night for ice cream rather than just buying a few large containers and putting them in the freezer. :)

Many years ago I was at a small group meeting with Terry Myerson who ran the Windows phone org and had just assumed responsibility of the entire Windows org. I had a Nokia 1520 (the giant phone) and he asked me what I thought of it. I said I loved it, and then complained about how it kept on dropping bluetooth with my car's head unit, a new Subaru STi.

The next day there was an engineer sitting in the back of my car with a bunch of test devices capturing traces of the BT comms with the head unit. Apparently Subaru didn't sell enough units to warrant its own certification process for BT so this was the first time engineers had looked at it. IIRC it did get better a few updates later; it was maddeningly unusable out of the box.

Ford has been known to send corp engineers to dealerships to help diagnose and resolve recurring issues in specific vehicles (has happened to a coworker of mine, and the engineer did end up fixing the issue!) -- I wouldn't entirely doubt.

Some versions say it's the dealership, not the manufacturer, being contacted, which seems more probable.[0] (It's also from the 70s, which also helps it be a little more believable, imo.)

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

I once sent a message via linkedin to a VP of an error I was getting on their company's website. He answered and had one guy on their team to look into it. They fixed it the next day. Sometimes people answer their messages!

It does happen, sometimes. Sometimes it's a case of who you know.

When I was at Amazon, Jeff sent out a question-mark email after a complaint from a customer, something he used to do when a direct email complaint caught his attention in some particular way. The complaint was that some amazon hardware was having difficulty with this customers wifi network. I want to say it was a 1st gen Echo, but it has been close to a decade since, and I only saw the report that was produced from the situation, that I honestly forget the particulars.

That question mark email ended up with Amazon sending some senior engineers around to go figure out what was going on at the customer's home, and figure out what that meant for the device and how it might be mitigated. It ended up being some weird combination of physical properties of the house, the wifi arrangement, and some suboptimal behaviour in the Amazon device that was fixed via a subsequent software update.

Sending mail to the President doesn't mean it was handled by the President. They've got a staff to handle customer service requests.

I agree it seems unlikely, but it's still a fun story.