zlacker

Regarding your puzzle, the mention of unicode is strange considering the string "hiring" can be handled with ordinals < 255 in any language (ie: no special handling for unicode required). Some languages make unicode ordinals easy, others not so much. Perhaps encoded("hiring☺")@smartgift.it? ;)

>>develo+(OP)
Yes, it's a bit of a red herring. Or it was, until you gave it away :) I guess next time we'll have to demand EBCDIC.