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It's Monday morning. Fernando just sat down at his desk for another hard day at work - programming stuff and answering telephone calls - "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

As he is about to login onto his machine he notices a tiny bit of yellow paper sticking out from underneath the keyboard. He moves the keyboard away to find a sticky note with the following text on it:

51577830494373674D773D3D

He is not quite sure what to make of it, but he thinks that the new intern, Ganna, left it for him. The previous night the two were out on a date. He took her to this fancy restaurant and they seemed to have a really good time together. However when they had almost finished eating, she received a call and after a brief moment she said she had an urgent matter to attend to - promptly leaving without offering any explanation.

This made him think that she didn't actually enjoy the date at all - so he didn't quite bother call her afterwards.

Hints:

#1 (Obvious): Ganna is also a WINDOWS software developer. [Thanks for pointing out guys]

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    $\begingroup$ Clearly not a very good engineer then. The message is blantantly longer than the information she wishes to convey. $\endgroup$
    – Neil
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 11:18
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    $\begingroup$ @Neil: Have you ever met a woman? $\endgroup$
    – Twinkles
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 12:13
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    $\begingroup$ I think saying "Have you ever met a woman" proves he has a sense of humour. Calm down :) $\endgroup$
    – Jimmery
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 13:58
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    $\begingroup$ Taking your own intern out on a date is a bloody stupid idea. $\endgroup$
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 18:45
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    $\begingroup$ Where does it say she was his intern? It says "the new intern", he could very well be the second newest. "...rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis!" $\endgroup$
    – Silvio Levy
    Commented Nov 22, 2014 at 18:36

1 Answer 1

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Three steps:

Since there is no higher letter than F we can assume it is Hex code, if we convert it to ASCII: QWx0ICsgMw==

This looks like

a base64-encoded string. If we decode that: Alt + 3

Which gives us the following result when used in a web browser:

♥

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    $\begingroup$ Oh, the things I'd do for love... $\endgroup$
    – Twinkles
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 10:16
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    $\begingroup$ Where does Alt+3 create a heart symbol? $\endgroup$
    – nanofarad
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 11:38
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    $\begingroup$ Generally you use the numpad for alt codes. Alt + Numpad 3 would probably be a bit more appropriate, but it wouldn't be a puzzle without some details being implicit. $\endgroup$
    – zzzzBov
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 14:55
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    $\begingroup$ Alt+(Numpad)3 works on Windows. So Ganna is a windows developer, which explains why she prefers long, convoluted, cryptic stuff over short and readable code. $\endgroup$
    – Guntram Blohm
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 16:35
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    $\begingroup$ "look, it's not you, it's your Operating System..." $\endgroup$
    – ch3ka
    Commented Nov 21, 2014 at 16:41

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