Long or Short Capital

An email sent to me on Wednesday

from: Connie Perry < [redacted]@monteiroandco.com>
to: [mrjugglesemail]
subject: ” To Err is Human, To Really Screw Up, You Need a Computer” Popular Campus T-Shirt, CA 1980

Hello,

We are working with [Author], Director of the [Something Fancy Sounding at Some Place], Haas Fellow in Finance, and author and speaker. We are excited to be working on his new book [Book Title] ([Book details, including ISBN and price, redacted]).

I’ve included a brief description of its content below:

[Author’s] [Book] is a serious yet funny book about how technology, markets, and machines rose to prominence and how the geeks came to rule and still rule the Street. In it he explains the role of technology in the crisis of 2008 as well as ways we can avoid such calamaties in the future. The book is peppered with quirky historical facts and witty comments to balance out how hard it is to see the difference between financial markets and computer networks. There are also some great visuals. [Author’s] conversational style and good humor gives us a better sense of how technology shapes today’s markets. He also takes a serious and insightful look at how Wall Street should participate in the future of electronic finance.

Please let me know if you have any questions, or would like more information.

Thank you and cheers,
Connie Perry
Monteiro and Company
[redacted ph#]
www.[redacted].com

Below are a few of [Author’s] favorite quotes:
“Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code.”
—Hacker Proverb

“A computer does not substitute for judgment anymore than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.”
—Robert McNamara

“Progress may have been all right once, but it’s gone on far too long.”
—Ogden Nash
PS: Here is a link to David in the late 1990’s presenting introductory material from [His Book]: [Youtube link]

Note that not only did she misspell “calamities”, but the emails included a black border on the left, the kind that happens when text is sloppily cut and pasted, or forwarded. My reply:

Connie, do you see that line on the left side of your email? That means you forwarded it, I believe. Not only that, but you in no way sent this to me, a person, with feelings, a heart and my own identity, because you don’t reference my feelings, my heart or my own identity in any way. You blasted this to a group of random people and the result for this poor chap [Author] is that I will never read his book. In fact, if someone asks me about [Book name], I will tell them that it is bllody [sic] awful, and that you are better off buggering a tree than attempting to read its hackneyed prose and its overly wrought conclusions.

Think about this fact the next time you lazily blast a bunch of strangers in a coldly worded spam email.

On an unrelated note, do you want to grab a drink or maybe just cut right to making out a little bit in the back of a town car? Call me.

Her reply came back within a few hours:

Well, well I take a mild offense at “lazy” and “random blast.” With my superior intellect I researched various bloggers whom I believe have feelings, heart and identities that may relate to and with a writer who is covering a very relatable topic. So sorry not to have addressed you as Mr. Juggles, sir in my hello. I guess I’m in a hurry to promote a good book. What a mess I am, doing my job.

Now on an unrelated note, I’d rather read than swap spit with you today. Please don’t call.

And my final reply:

Actually, your note which you marked as “unrelated” was actually “related.” And it’s funny that you indicated that you’d rather read than have to deal with my advances. You and your ilk, the cold-emailers of the world, do exactly the same thing to me, except in an unsolicited fashion. You probe my email account when I’d rather be doing just about anything else. It doesn’t work. Stop doing it. Try developing a relationship with a site, or a person, like by making out in the back of a town car. That is how you serve your clients’ interests.

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