Second Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award

It's been a while. Let's get right to it: it's a little part of the story of the past week in the form of a glamorous and prestigious awards banquet.

Let me recall to you the award description:

Lord Kelvin, the famous British physicist, once wrote,

Quaternions came from Hamilton... and have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way. Vector is a useless survival... and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.

In honour of his getting one out of two, and being hilariously mistaken on count of the one he missed, the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award is given irregularly to "those entities that in the estimation of the award committee have never been of the slightest use to any creature."

You must be thinking: competition was tough this year. I haven't gone back and checked but I know I was publicly threatening at least one collection of miscreants crossing my path with a bit of perpetual disgrace. I can't remember if I said that it was Moving & Storage or Dining Services that was "in line for one, missing only the requisite irony." It was probably MS, because DS certainly has a lot of irony going for it. The awards committee had about made up its mind for an honourary citation one Saturday evening last February when they booked Procter Hall during the dinner hour for some random group who desired a big room for their random self-congratulatory shindig. And I swear that their failure to expand breakfast hours, instead tacking on an hour to dinner, missing the recommendation of a task force created to report on their operation, would be worth an honour by itself. But no: like a gift from the improbable child of Melpomene and Thalia came a late entry that stole the show. Dining Services will have to settle for a Lifetime Achievement Award around the time I graduate. The only trouble will be tracking down all their nonsense to stick on the citation.

But back to the darling of the hour, my own financial servitors here at Princeton, the PNC Bank. It's not just that they won't let me re-order cheques online until I've re-ordered at least once already, yet give me no instructions on how to do that. That's already doubly useless, but they're far more useless than that. Let me give the balance of the award citation in the form of a little story about how they got my mountain goat, and then tried to take away my other goats.

Last Wednesday I was out shopping for some things, starting with my glasses. I placed an order for those early in the afternoon, and after finishing up with the optometrist shining a light in my eyes had a few minutes to spare while the lenses were shaped. I had wanted to get some new shoes, so this seemed an opportune occasion. Surprisingly, I quickly found something I wanted. However, there was a slightly difficulty at the counter.

"Your card has been declined," the cashier told me.

"What?" said I, somewhat ineloquently, leaning down to read the transaction receipt before me, a formidable task with my pupils still widely dilated and adding to my disorientation. She repeated herself as I scanned to try to find the words that said this. "How can it be?" I asked myself. The card is not a true credit card, but my chequing account with a credit-card-number to access it; there is no chance something could have gone wrong, and the timing, say fourty minutes after purchasing my eyeglasses and paying for the eye exam before that, made me feel I had stepped into a Dali canvas.

I chalked it up to a most curious fault, until the next time I tried to use my card in this capacity. "Authorisation declined," I was informed enigmatically by a machine. "What?" said I, somewhat ineloquently, to no one at all.

I resolved to find out what was happening, soon, before Amazon tries to ship my books and discovers that my money is suddenly no good.

As it happens, to take a little digression, I had further reason to have a word or two with my bank. Back last fall they sent me a little Form W-9 in the mail, basically an information request, looking for my SSN. I, of course, neither had nor was eligible to obtain one. That's OK; I can give them an ITIN -- if I had an ITIN; if you recall the aftermath of last year's KUCA imbroglio, I discovered that none of the threatening letters were applicable to me since as a citizen of Canada my country's government has no tax treaty with the American state and I am permitted to apply for an ITIN only at the time of actually filing my return. So I filed away this request for a future time, like next year, after my spring tax return is processed.

Sometime over the summer my bank apparently became quite agitated with this situation, sending me duplicate forms with stern warnings about backup withholding. Their problem, you see, is that they didn't know how much tax I was meant to pay on the interest my account bears. Considering said amount was about seventy cents, I had been quite prepared to forego the whole amount and think myself the richer for having saved myself the anxiety of working out another stultifying form.

But now that I had a real ITIN, things seemed to have improved on the throwing-them-a-bone front. There was only one remaining problem: the last item of the statement about the signature line, the one I'm certifying under penalty of perjury, is that I'm a U.S. person. A little investigation (online; they didn't bother to include any instructions, the useless critters) revealed this is synonymous with citizen or resident alien. I am neither; I'm a nonresident alien, and will be for the duration of my stay as a graduate student.

Well, what to do? I had to speak to someone at the bank. So I went to do this.

We tackled the second problem first. After a little time, I was advised to merely cross out the offending part of the certification and sign the damn'd thing. "Isn't there a different form I'm supposed to submit?" I asked meekly. Well, yes, but no.

At this stage I broached the first problem. After a minute or two of data-hunting on the PC, my consultant informed me that this had been the trouble.

"What?" said I, somewhat ineloquently. She elaborated. My failure to submit a Form W-9 was at cause. "Oh, really," said I.

Presently I left the bank, hobbling my way down to Fine Hall for the next of the day's errands. And I thought: It's not just that this is the first chance I've had to possibly submit the damn'd thing. What are these useless creatures doing, declining my card because they don't know if I'm supposed to pay fourteen percent or thirty percent on seventy cents?

And that's what it'll say on the plaque. Congratulations, guys.

* * *

But at least she was right. Amazon has already started to send me some things.