my favorite late night wrong number call:

me: hu-ll-oh? female voice: who is this? me: i think you have the wrong number. female voice: no i don't. me: huh? female voice: where the fuck is vicki? me: fuck off [click]

Perhaps your eyes burn out of the bad karma you receive from the way you treat people. It was an accidental miss-dial that you perceive as some diabolical plot intended to cause you pain.

My advice: get over yourself, read a book on social etiquette, lighten up and it might go away.

BTW: I really do enjoy wonko.com and I think you are really smart and talented. I have learned a ton from this site and personally use LazyLoad and Pants and some of your other stuff. I also think that life is too short to be condescending and angry all the time.

I'm sorry, have we met?

"Condescending and angry" isn't how I imagine most people who know me would describe me. Like a lot of people, I often use my blog to let off a little steam. That doesn't mean the steam is all there is.

I'm not sure what gave you the impression that I thought the call was a "diabolical plot". I just thought it was annoying. I was even perfectly polite to the caller until she asked me to identify myself. When you call someone at 4:15 in the morning, you'd better know who they are.

In any case, if you'd like to gain some insight into why I was a little annoyed, I'd be happy to give you a call at 4:15 some morning.

Usually not angry, but you gotta admit condescending. Agreed, a blog is a good place to vent...and during our discussions for (my) possible employment at Kryptiq you exemplified no such negativity.

"Me: Who the fuck is this?" on the fifth pleasantry exchanged doesn't register to me as "perfectly polite" but please correct me if I am reading into this too deeply.

4:15 is 7:15 on the east coast.

I didn't get the job due to my lack of ability to recite the W3's definition of div and span off of the top of my head (it was a blessing in disguise).

Ah, so we have met. Of course, I still don't know who you are, so I can't say why you didn't get the job. I do try to be forgiving on the div/span thing as long as the candidate at least knows how to use them, so there may have been another reason why we didn't offer you the job. It could be that you did well, but not as well as someone else who we ended up hiring.

I hope I didn't come off as condescending in the interview. I try hard not to, but it's tricky. If a candidate gets something wrong, I want to be honest with them (and, if possible, teach them something so they'll do better in the future), but it can sometimes be hard to do that without coming off as condescending.

Anyway, I said I was polite to the caller until she asked who I was, at which point I responded rudely. And, according to my iPhone, she called from a number in Santa Cruz, so it was indeed 4:15 where she was (I actually checked before writing the blog post, just in case).

The div/span comment was sorta tongue-in-cheek. I am sure they just found (at least what they considered) somebody better suited for the job. No hard feelings.

Forwardness is a must in professional situations, where you are expected to act as, well, a professional. In no way did I mistake feedback as condescension.

Take care.

I had a friend in college who has the unfortunate happenstance of having the extension in his dorm room that was the same as the prefix for the local pizza joint. (On campus you would dial 9 to get outside, or four digits to call on campus. Pizza was 555-2368, while his extension was 5552.)

Friday and Saturday nights there would be non-stop calls from inebriated students attempting to order pizzas. He eventually got so fed up the school changed his number.

Of course, in the interim, we had hours of fun telling callers their orders would be ready in 30 minutes and to come pick them up.

div is block-level, span is inline. You're missing amazing work - we're changing the face of healthcare.