Everyone in the village used the well. Everyone could see the rope was wearing thin. Nobody changed it. In 1988, in a university computer room, a young engineer made one small improvement to his own program, so that it would be more reliable. Four lines of code.It took less than a minute.By morning, machines hundreds of kilometres apart had stopped working.Nothing had been stolen.Nothing had been deleted. And there was nobody to telephone.A story about the distance between caring and being responsible — and about who owns the rope.