I've been receiving emails from a company with the sub-title "Market Intelligence".
You have no idea how much I hate these guys (marketeers that is. The rep himself is perfectly personable).
Chou En has been feeling a bit got at in the office since I pointed out the faults of wikipedia. I think the conversation went something along the lines of
"So what about answers.com? Can we trust them?"
"Naw, they just lift everything from Wikipedia."
So to be nice to him, I have started a rumour that he can solve solution protein structures just by listening to the hum of the magnet. With a high enough sampling frequency, the capacity to hear radio waves in the centimetre range and the ability to do fast fourier transforms in three dimensions on the fly, it shouldn't be too hard.
Back to emails from companies. Even with his fantastical ability, Chou En is unable to decipher a simple email. He asked a certain company for the price of an NMR tube cleaning brush, and gave a catalogue number. Maybe you can do better. Here is the reply he received:
Thankyou for your recent inquiry with $COMPANY. Unfortunately , we are not able to process your request at this time. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to receive any additional information about any of our other products and services.
What does that mean? Is the item out of stock? Not carried? Is the computer down? Why can't these people just talk English instead of machine code? Should we perform a Turing Test?
What's really funny is the tagline on the bottom of the email from the company:
A day without a smile, is a wasted day
I should suggest to Chou En that he write back, saying "I for one welcome our machine overlords" and see if that melts their vacuum tubes.
