"Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct." (Futurama, 2acv11: How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back).

Today I would like to talk to you about an afflicion that affects a large number ot tech workers: a penchant for finding the most technically correct and the most useless way to answer one's queries.

Here's an example of my interaction with my favorite support engineer at our hosting company. We were chatting about DNS setup, and it was perfectly clear to him that what I meant to ask was "is it an A record or a CNAME record".

"2:31 PM me: what kind of a record is it?
2:31 PM him: A DNS record :)"

This brand of humor probably has its beginnings in early computer games, like Zork, where the computer would answer your questions only when they were asked "correctly". Techies often take this kind of humor to ridiculous extremes.

For instance, I have a high school friend, L. A brilliant programmer, he likes to think that it's hilarious to answer every single question this way. L lives in New York. I once was talking to another friend of mine, R, who is not a techie and who lives in Boston. I was telling her about L's penchant for being technically correct. I illustrated this phenomenon with an old Soviet joke:

"Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went on a hot air balloon ride. A storm took the balloon above the clouds, and after a few days brought it down close to the ground. Below a man was herding sheep.

- "Where are we?" - Dr. Watson cried to him.
- The man looked at them and replied - "You are in a hot air balloon."

The wind once again picked up and pulled the balloon beyond clouds.

- "What do you think that man's profession is?" - asked Holmes.
- "Why, he's a shepherd" - answered Watson.
- "No, he's a computer programmer".
- "Why do you think so?"
- "Elementary, my dear Watson. His answer was technically correct, but absolutely useless. So, where do you think we are now?"
- "I have no idea - he didn't say, did he?"
- "We are in the Soviet Union."
- "Why?"
- "A computer programmer is herding sheep.""

My friend laughed, but I insisted that L was really like that in real life.

A few months later R called me and said, "You won't believe this story. I was in New York, walking down Brighton beach. I really needed to get some cash. I asked a passerby - "Excuse me, where's the closest ATM?". "Why, in the closest bank, of course" - he answered with a smile. R stared for a bit, and then said, "say, is your name L, by any chance?"".

It was indeed L, whom she randomly met in NYC.

I laughed, and told her another, old Jewish joke about search algorithms and certain applications of the Drake Equation.

"Two Jews, one young and one old, are riding Kiev - Odessa train. The old one is looking at the young one and thinking to himself -

"This young man, he's either going to get off at Zmerinka or at Odessa. You only go to Odessa to make money or to spend money. He's too young to make money and too shabbily dressed to spend money, so he's going to Zmerinka. You only go to Jmerinka for weddings or for funerals. Nobody died for a while, so he's going to a wedding. He's not carriying a present, so he's going to his own wedding. There are only two eligible brides - Sarah and Rebecca. But Rebecca just got married, so this means he's going to marry Sarah. Sarah is not very good looking and has a bad temper, so only a total putz would marry her. Now, who's a total putz in Kiev?"

- "Excuse me, are you Shlomo, Moishe Rabinowitz's son?" - he asks the younger gentleman.
"Yes I am, do you know me?" - says they youngster.
"No, I don't know you," - says the old man - "but I figured you out".

A friend of mine, a contractor, recently came to me with a strange problem. He did an excellent job renovating my apartment, and since then he got used to me delousing his Windows computer and coming up with creative googled-up solutions for just about anything. This one has me stumped though.

Right now he is demolishing a location, previously occupied by a bank. It has a vault door in it that my friend needs to cart away.

He wants to sell it. I mean, the thing looks valuable - but I have no idea of who would want something like that. Movie people? A restaurant? Eric Sink (his company has a product called Vault and he must be flush after Microsoft buying a chunk of his stuff). I wonder what would happen if we did place it on eBay. Well, in fact there are a few of them there, and people don't seem to be buying.

Blue Sun Corporation is and important, but not very noticeable part of the the brilliant, but so very canceled TV series Firefly. Their logo is everywhere you look, but they are oh so very evil. They conveniently provide all sorts of goods and services, but at the same time they run sinister human experiments, employ vicious killers and wallow in their crapulence in every imaginable way an evil corporation could.

You can buy your very own Blue Sun t-shirt at Think Geek.

In Manhattan there are two corporations that very much remind me of Blue Sun: Verizon and Chase. Every time I deal with them I feel that I am forced to do things that I don't want to do and that I am getting a bad deal. The only reason everybody's dealing with Chase and Verizon is because they are everywhere you look. In Manhattan you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Chase branch, and Verizon cellular signal reaches underground into some subway stations.

Chase advertises its omnipresence with this sinister ad that could just as well be from an alien infection film.

This kind of ubiquity allows these corporations to charge above market prices and have bad customer service.

Why do I hate Chase? Well, they keep thinking of ways to make depositing money more difficult. First they changed their deposit slips. Am I the only one inconvenienced by that? No. Here somebody altered the little poster announcing the change.

Now they started using cash machines that do not take envelopes, but scan your check. As you, me, and the people who plowed money into Riya, you can't rely on computers to non-trivial optical recognition. I tried depositing 3 checks several times. The machine ate one of the checks (not giving me a receipt) and rejected the other two. I wasted a lot of time and cell phone minutes trying to report the issue (they did not even provide a courtesy customer service phone). I still haven't seen the money from that check.

Lying commission-driven customer service is another big problem. At Chase they constantly trying to sell you something. Once a customer rep tried to sell me a historically market out-performing mutual funds. He had this awesome "prospectus" with charts carefully selected to show crazy returns, but refused to give me a copy so I could research it.

Verizon reps will routinely forget to tell you about contract extension that comes with any service change, even if you don't have get a new phone. Then they will refuse to change anything in your contract. They will add expensive features you don't ask for. Good luck trying to have your defective phone repaired - it's an ordeal.

Both Chase and Verizon are a bad value, but great convenience. I suspect that part of their penchant for name changing is not so much because they keep buying up competition, but because their customers don't think very well of them at all. I was their customer when they were Chemical Bank and Bell Atlantic. They sucked back then too.

The worst part of dealing with banks and communications companies is that they heavily penalize you for your mistakes, but there's not much you can do to charge them for theirs.

Chase stopped sending me Amazon credit card rewards for about a year. An hour of customer service phone calls and a month later I got my Amazon gift certificates. It's free for them to mess with you: you have to do a lot of work to make sure that what you get from them actually comes through. Instead of digitally depositing the certificates, they send them on paper slips containing long strings of letters that you have to type in. It's cheaper to splurge on the cost of printing and mailing in the hope that it will get lost. And if they stop sending them and you forget? Bonus. Also, there's something called "float."

On the other hand, send your credit card payment late and you get a huge fee.

Use a bit more minutes than are in your Verizon plan, and you'll get a bill that will make your teeth grind. But on the other hand, they overcharge you and then sheepishly return the money (which just now happened to me), you don't get to charge them a fine.

I think there was this guy who charged his bank a fine for every mistake that they've made, but I can't find a link.

Anyway, to make the long story short, Verizon and Chase make me want to vomit in terror. I've been with them for years, but it's time for a change.

It's interesting to note that I've worked for both Chase (briefly as a consultant) and for Newscorp. What's interesting about it? Well, Newscorp owns New York Post which was founded by Alexander Hamilton. The "Manhattan" part of Chase Manhattan Bank (as Chase used to be known) comes from The Manhattan company, founded by none other than Aaron Burr. Because I currently work at the World Trade Center, I frequently walk past Hamilton's grave in Trinity churchyard.