When you work in the industry, you're bound to meet various types of people. Some friendly, some cunnng, some short tempered, some obnoxious, etc... There are also times when you never actually get to meet the person, but only end up conversing over e-mail or the phone. After you go through a few of such encounters, you're bound to run into the type of people who put canned signatures at the end of their e-mails, so that it appends some some generic end remarks like "Best regards" on every e-mail message they send followed by their contact info. That, to me, means one of three things

• The person lacks the creativity to respond to individual e-mails with appropriate, and context sensitive end remarks
• The person is too lazy to bother spending time to decide what the end remark should be
• The person doesn't consider e-mail a communication medium where human beings are involved, and thinks that there exists some technical specification that says "The e-mail parser requires that you terminate your message with a 13 bytes long NULL terminated character array that spells 'Best Regards'. Please do not include the single quotes."

I'm sorry, but I can't help but imagine that they have some pent up angst against the world or they're just so jaded and tired that they want to minimize the frequency of human-to-human interaction as much as they can. I'm thinking that if we conductd a turing test between them and the state of the art super computer, they'd fail the test before the super computer would. -.-;

Well, so things got even more interesting today when I called this person up to ask a question about a product they had sold us. This is, as far as I know, standard practice; a vendor sells you stuff, you ask for support, you get it. Pretty simple. The Q&A session goes by without much progress as this person only knows how to say that other people who use this product hasn't asked him about the question I had, and so he was inclined to believe that the problem was not related to their product. Is that a round about way of saying "Dude,I so don't have time for this, I want to go back to my cubicle and back into my world of virtual paradise"??? Ok, so I'm willing to accept that as it is... I guess not everybody has the personality to try and troubleshoot something the way a person with empathy would normally be able to. Fine. Now, here's the kicker. After the phone conversation ends, the person calls back just to tell me that, from now on, he'd prefer if I e-mailed him with questions rather than calling him...

Wow...

Simply WOW! He also assured me that he's pretty good with e-mails and that he's frequently online. That's awesome, man... I feel so much better! You rock my world!