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Friday, August 24, 2001

How Not to Handle an INTP

Vincent, my previous business partner and company lawyer, told me today he has been amusing his fellow lawyers with the following story about me:

You were asking me a lot of difficult, but perfectly reasonable, questions about the federal income taxation of partnerships, which I know very little about. So I went out on the internet and unearthed the biggest, densest, moldiest honker of a treatise I could find. As I recall, it was about 650 pages, and dry as dust. The introduction claimed that the subject was one of the most obscure ones in all of law, and the author doubted that more than two or three withered old lawyers (presumably including himself) understood it.

"HA!," I thought, believing that I figured out a way to get some relief from your merciless questioning. So I sent you the link to the treatise, and suggested nonchalantly that, if you were interested in learning about the taxation of partnerships, you might take a look at ol' Compendio Horribilis, or whatever it was called, by Confusticus Maximus, or whatever his name was. I then left the office with a light heart.

Early the next morning, one of the first things I found in my email was a message from you with a series of excruciating questions in the form of "why does Confusticus say on page 425 of the Compendio that 'X,' while on page 576 he says 'Y.'" Argh!!!!

The worst part of it was that now I had to actually read parts of the dreaded Compendio myself. I'll never make THAT mistake again. I don't mean the mistake of reading Confusticus (though I hope I won't ever have to do that, either), but the mistake of trying to clog a brush chopper by feeding it brush.

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