I am Mr. Resourceful…
Or, another way of putting it, I am Mr. Must Be Resourceful Because Sometimes I’m An Idiot.
Names and other identifiable information have been changed to protect the innocent.
This past Monday, while out on a consulting gig in Menlo Park, I received a phone call from a new client who needed some notarizations done during the late evening. Fine, no problem. You’re located in Palo Alto and you want an appointment at 9:00 p.m.? Sure. I wrote down the information on an available whiteboard and went about my day’s business.
As you no doubt have already guessed, it wasn’t until long after I went through the hour-long hëll-ride commute back home that I realized that I had left the contact information still sitting there on the whiteboard and that I had completely forgotten to write any of it down. Name? No. Address? Nope. Phone number? Sorry. And, of course, as it was now 8:05 p.m., less than an hour before my scheduled appointment, I had no access to the building, let alone the room with the whiteboard. I had a half hour before I had to leave or call it quits. The only things I could remember where that he had an unusual name and that he had mentioned living behind a landmark hotel. I knew the city (Palo Alto), the area code (650), and the first four letters of the street on which he lived (Quay) — which stuck out only because it was unusual for a street name.
Not much to go on.
The first thing to do was to check the caller ID log on my cell phone to see if I could narrow down which number was his, hoping that he didn’t have caller ID blocking. As luck would have it, only one number in the day’s log was from the 650 area code. I called it and got a night message announcing the hours and phone directory of American Banking Corporation. Now I knew the name of the company at which he worked. Great! My next thought was to see if I could find a directory of employees on their website. Of course, Google couldn’t find any website for the company, but after a bit more searching I miraculously came up with a press release mentioning the name of the president of ABC bank, Xavier Yentyl Zacharia, my customer.
8:08 p.m. Armed with his name and the his city of residence, I charged on to Switchboard.com to locate his home phone number and street address. It came up empty for an address, but at least I now had a phone number! Eureka! Problem solved. Now I just had to call him up and ask for his address again!
No answer.
8:11 p.m. I still needed an address, so I Googled for the address of the landmark hotel in order to search the neighborhood. Fortunately, the hotel had its own website and a subsequent call to Mapquest brought up the exact map I needed. I recognized Quaystone Court, the street name he’d given to me over the phone. Of course, the entire area was infused with Quaystone streets: Quaystone Court, Quaystone Way, Quaystone Place. Which one was it?
Back to Google.
8:16 p.m. I searched for “Zacharia Quaystone Palo Alto” and easily retrieved a list of political contributors to a Palo Alto city councilman’s campaign, one with the name Xavier Zacharia who lived on Quaystone Place in Palo Alto. Now things are cooking; I’ve narrowed down the exact street! MapQuest showed the street as a tiny cul-de-sac, but, short of standing in the middle of the circle and yelling out for Mr. Zacharia, I was ever so close, yet still not quite there.
8:18 p.m. Hmmmm. Political contributions?! During my short stint as campaign manager for city councilwoman Barbara Nesbet’s beyond-hope bid for state assembly, one of the projects I spearheaded was to massage gigabytes of voter registration data for the entire Santa Clara County. Along with the history of each voter’s voting records is a complete address.
Scrambling through backup CDs of the time period, I came across what I hoped was the correct disc and popped it in my laptop. After locating the Perl script folders that had copies of the volumous voter registration data, I fired up Funduc’s Search and Replace tool, just about the best utility for Microsoft Windows since… well… nothing else comes even close. Within seconds after telling it to search for “Zacharia” I had the full street address for Xavier. 123 Quaystone Place, Palo Alto, CA.
8:21 p.m. Nine minutes before I had to leave. Mission accomplished.
I am Mr. Resourceful.
“Along with the history of each voter’s voting records” Only the fact that they did vote, I assume. Not how.
Oh, yes! Including how! - RDL
That is absolutely outrageous. I know politicians exempting themselves from the laws they impose on others happens all the time. But I find this more disturbing than usual. That anyone can see how I voted as long as they are connected to a political campaign. My secret ballot isn’t secret? All those years of stepping into the booth, pulling the curtain and casting my vote in private. And here I might have well just sent a xerox of my ballot to my political enemies. And I though the hypocrisy of politicians wouldn’t suprise me any more.