In what officials are calling an “unprecedented mix-up,” the government’s IT helpdesk reportedly mistook the Prime Minister’s speech notes for an elaborate puzzle, resulting in a three-day delay to a major policy announcement.
The confusion began last Friday when the PM’s office sent the final draft of the highly anticipated speech intended for the national infrastructure unveiling to IT for a routine upload onto the government’s secure briefing system. However, the helpdesk technician assigned to the ticket allegedly assumed the document was some kind of cryptic puzzle game, rather than a straightforward text file.
According to insiders, the technician who received the ticket described the speech notes—which contained standard briefing points, bullet lists, and a few scribbled margin notes—as “a confounding code to unlock,” and proceeded to spend the next 72 hours attempting every known cipher technique from Morse code to Sudoku-style number grids. The technician reportedly even printed the notes out and taped them to the office wall, marking lines with highlighter and post-it notes in a bid to “crack the enigma.”
Meanwhile, policy teams were left scratching their heads as the deadline came and went without the usual announcement or press briefing. Senior officials were forced to issue a vague statement indicating “technical difficulties with document processing” as spin doctors scrambled to spin the delay into a triumph of additional careful review.
The IT manager finally discovered the error when another team member questioned why a speech was being treated like a puzzle meant to be solved, prompting a quick reassessment. Once the file was recognized for what it was, the policy announcement was fast-tracked and published hours later, albeit three days behind schedule.
Government spokespeople declined to name the technician responsible, but sources suggest the individual has since requested a transfer out of the helpdesk’s “cipher and code” division, which does not actually exist.
When asked about the incident, one official joked, “We always knew our policies were complex, but no one expected to have to solve them with a cryptographic decoder ring.”
The episode has sparked renewed discussions on whether speech notes should be sent in a simpler format — or accompanied by a “Not a Puzzle” sticker.
For now, the Prime Minister’s office is reportedly reformatting future speeches as plain text emails to avoid further decoding dramas, while the IT helpdesk is considering a mandatory “Puzzle or Policy?” training module.