Someone has been naughty

A few days ago one of my credit cards was canceled, and my account was closed due to "inactivity". Indeed, I had not used that card for nine months, and those in the credit card company probably figured that I did not need it anyway.
That letter kinda reminded me of something that happened to my boss a while ago.

My boss had a lovely pet dog whom the entire family cherished. They loved her so much that they gave her an official name, I mean, the kind of name with first name, middle initial, and the family's last name. That name was also used for registration and medical purposes.
One evening after my boss returned home from work, he found in his mailbox a letter addressed to the dog. What's more amazing is that enclosed was a VISA card bearing the dog's name, and an official notice from the credit card company congratulating the dog on the approval of her application. My boss was so amused that he kept the letter and the card as a souvenir. He suspected that his twenty year old daughter was behind this hideous plot, because it was so easy to pick up a credit card application form in a college bookstore, and fill out all the information about herself, with a mere change of the first name. Of course, his daughter denied such ungrounded accusation.

I did not know whether or not anyone in my boss's family activated that card. If so, they did not need to pay attention to it anyway, because the account was probably going to be closed due to "inactivity".

An outrageous letter to editors (from The Journal of Systems & Software)

Enclosed is our latest version of Ms # XX-XX-XX-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over helpless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as review C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights.

To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-friedvegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it without your input.