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No go INFO
Holy relic? Example of industrial heritage? What is that thing that’s rotting away at the door of the regional delegation of Faro’s IPJ (the Portuguese youth institute)? It’s been there so long, no-one notices it anymore. It has become invisible. If it wasn’t for the desperate way it looked, it would already have blended into the surrounding landscape.
Edition 663 ( 3 Feb 2011), 
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One thing’s for certain: it didn’t fall from the sky. It’s not attractive in any way – but it does have a life story. At the beginning of the 90s, the INFOCID programme was created (the abbreviation for a rather pompous full name: interdepartmental system of information for the citizen). The idea was ambitious and up-to-date – and involved getting the common man to interact with information technology, so that he could inform himself on various topics to do with the functioning of the country.
As the prime minister of the time, António Guterres, said, these electronic booths would be “a unique window in on public administration”, “a space of transcendental importance for the Portuguese public administration” no less.
With enthusiasm and help from the bucket-loads of money arriving from Europe, tens of these electronic INFOCIDs were sited around the country. Still today you can see them, mouldering away, clogging up streets and pavements where they were strategically placed to keep the common man in touch with information technology (trusting, of course, that they were working). According to a source close to Faro’s IPJ (who prefers to remain anonymous), this particular one “never worked very well”.
Indeed, there was once a time when someone offered a lobster to anyone who could find an INFOCID that did work. We understand the lobster survived the challenge…
But what’s interesting is that this decrepit chunk of obsolete machinery is well and truly embedded in IPJ’s metal entrance gate, as if whoever placed it there meant it to remain for all eternity. If it had been a Multibanco machine, or worth any money, it would probably already have been torn from its roots by a joy-riding JCB.
But these days - now that there’s no money for pioneering projects for the common man; now that child support and other benefits are being stripped from the common man - it’s probably not wise to remove INFOCID, anyway. It would leave a hole without the money available to fix it.
Better leave it as it is – waiting for better days, just like the rest of us.
