Hopeless Geek

Some folks are incapable of taking context clues very well and just lay waste to whatever person seems remotely relavent to their angst. This happens now and again to me, and I think it’s a product of having five years’ worth of entries on the web. Something about having a critical mass of entries on various topics (and my choice thereof, surely) seems to bring large numbers of idiots together to kick the doors now and again.

So, this time, there was an item on Digg about some fellow having a billing problem with Verizon. That sucks. In the comments, where there’s a ton of people for and against (as always), there’s a link to an entry I made a while back when I was investigating leaving Sprint for Verizon and noticed a funny problem with the way they handled numerical precision on their website.

I would hope that any reasonable person would see a recorded call about a price issue with someone’s bill and a blog entry about bad web coding as two different entities and not make the jump, but so far six people have stupidly inferred that I was the one making the call (I was not). Normally, not a problem. However, well …

From: fjdkjkj@erizon.com
Subject: [codepoetry] you
Date: December 8, 2006 5:35:29 PM CST

cant stand you sent a message using the contact form at
http://www.codepoetry.net/contact.

I think you just like to hear yourself speak. just get over it and pay the
money you effin tight wad!!

Most of them had some variation of that. One was a statement of congratulations for making the call. Six people sent me messages, thinking I was that person. Now, given that some small percentage of people take action on assumptions, how many more must think I’m that person?

Critical thought is dead. People’s actions keep reminding me of this, but the optimist in me doesn’t want to believe it to be true. Yet, time and time again people rise to the challenge and shatter any hope that remains for the sanity of the human race.

Good job, people.