Cousin Mike sent this a couple weeks ago, along with what I think is someone’s incorrect mathematical explanation, under the title, “How You Can Tell You’ve Ticked Off an Engineer”. It works as a pretty good joke on its own but, to bring it full circle, you need to know a little history.

Seems engineer George Vaccaro took issue with Verizon for quoting him “.002 cents per kilobyte” for air time prior to his visit to Canada but billing him “.002 dollars per kilobyte” upon his return. After several unsuccessful attempts to explain the hundred-fold difference to Verizon, he recorded a twenty-six minute conversation with a Verizon manager which became famous on YouTube with more than a million hits. YouTube has since taken it down, but you can still listen to the original recorded exchange on Putfile or read the transcript on Verizonmath.

Enter my favorite physicist/cartoonist, Randall Munroe, who wrote the above check to satirize the whole comical issue. It’s funny all right, especially in view of its genesis, but for how much was the check actually written? Well, based on my very rusty high school calculus, and meaning no disrespect to whomever produced the above explanation, I think it’s a check for essentially “nothing”: