In the annals of crime Herman Snookerdorance is rarely remembered. For one thing his name was difficult to recall or even pronounce. For another, he was an unbearably obnoxious schmuck.
Anyone who has ever been the victim of crappy customer service from an ISP should learn about Snookerdorance. In 1947 he became the first person ever executed for "email murder" when he killed a customer by providing shitty, useless "solutions" to the customer's email problems. He did this by sending an asinine form email as a response to the man's desperate pleas for help, an email which seemed to indicate that he never even looked at the fucking question which he was sent.
Snookerdorance was a small time confidence man selling defective watermelons out of the back of his car on the shoulder of the Cross-Bronx Expressway when a friend offered him a job at "Hey Yo Daddy-O Software," one of the first service providers which opened "in the early days of the Internet right after World War II" (Al Gore, 'I Invented The Web' p.51). He had no actual computer skills and couldn't speak very well on the phone, yet he quickly rose through the customer service ranks because of his profound ability to grunt, say "umm-hmm" a lot and always make it seem as if the customer fucked up instead of the company. Very soon he was the head of customer service, specializing in problems with email.
Historians estimate that Snookerdorance probably killed about 55 people with his shitty customer service. Right before the state took his life he admitted to 23. He was very shrewd; he would delete any trace of his ridiculous answers the minute that he heard a customer had died as a result. He even developed a method to tap into the hard drive of the victim's machine in order to delete any evidence of his having tried to help them. The media of the day dubbed the unknown murderer the "ISP-TOS Killer," an abbreviation for "Internet Service Provider-Terms Of Service." They believed that whoever was committing these murders must be absolutely rigid in his/her belief that the service provider knows all, the customer is a moron and the company's terms of service should be followed to the letter in lieu of actually answering a customer question correctly or solving a problem satisfactorily.
Since detectives of the day were having an impossible time finding evidence it looked like the murders might never cease. But then a break came and it was Snookerdorance's own carelessness which led to his eventual undoing.
On July 13th, 1945, Snookerdorance received the following email from a Yonkers, New York plumber by the name of Arnaud Gastronitis:
Within seconds Mr. Gastronitis received the following response:
Upon opening this email Gastronitis, who was already prone to dyspepsia, became apoplectic and died of a combination of explosive gas, a massive coronary and multiple strokes. His wife read the email and, after vomiting up her dinner, phoned Yonkers detectives who promised to come investigate the minute they were finished eating.
Snookerdorance's mistake was that he got up to go the bathroom without first deleting all the evidence, which he had planned to do upon returning to his desk. He was wearing a ring that was loose which slipped off his finger and fell into the toilet; he then got his arm caught in the drain trying to fish it out. In the meantime the Yonkers detectives, hot dog mustard dripping from their mouths, arrived at the Gastronitis residence and were able to trace the email to Snookerdorance's computer. After stopping for more hot dogs they found Snookerdorance, his arm still stuck and dripping wet with toilet water. They pulled out his arm, and making sure to finish their hot dogs first, promptly arrested him.
The trial for Herman Snookerdorance began on September 15th, 1945, in the Bronx County Courthouse. It took six hours, five hours and fifty minutes of which were spent trying to make sense out of Snookerdorance's customer email responses. The jury reached its guilty verdict in five minutes; it seems that every member had somehow been screwed over by "Hey Yo Daddy-O Software." Lawyers for both sides would later say that it was impossible to find any jurors who weren't biased against the company or hadn't been screwed by them, so they simply went with the 12 men and women who seemed the least pissed off. When asked about the futility of defending Snookerdorance his lawyer commented "I would have had an easier time getting probation for Hitler." For the capital crime of "email murder," the judge sentenced Herman Snookerdorance to die in Sing Sing Prison's electric chair.
While sitting on death row Snookerdorance became his own lawyer, as he had been unhappy with his legal counsel. Executions in New York in the 1940's usually happened within six months of sentencing but Snookerdorance was able to keep the grim reaper away for almost two years by writing his own appeals. Historians have said the reason for this was the fact that the appeals were written in a confusing, hard to understand fashion, even for judges, so that it took much longer to get through them or to make sense of them. One appeal Snookerdorance filed didn't even have anything to do with his own case and addressed an entirely different issue; it concerned a guard suing the state for a uniform dry cleaning reimbursement, a case which Snookerdorance wasn't even a litigant in and which could do absolutely nothing to help save his life.
By the end of July, 1947, all his appeals were exhausted and so were the jurists who had to suffer through them. On Thursday, August 21st, 1947, at 11:02pm, the big oak door of the Sing Sing death chamber swung open and Snookerdorance entered defiantly, flanked by two guards and with the prison chaplain standing in front of him reading from a copy of "Death House Psalms For Dummies" which had been given to him as a gift by Snookerdorance. The condemned man faltered a bit when he first saw the chair but managed to regain his composure, walked quickly over to it, and sat down. Within a minute the guards had strapped him in and the executioner stepped over to attach the electrode to his head and drop the mask over his face.
It was then that Snookerdorance uttered his famous last words, so apropos for a man about to pay the ultimate penalty for "email murder." Not being able to see what was going on due to the mask over his face Snookerdorance assumed that the momentary pause while the executioner walked over to his controls was an indication that perhaps something was wrong with the machinery. The pause was made even longer than normal when the warden walked over to tell the executioner something. The room was absolutely silent. Snookerdorance, probably thinking that as a last hurrah he could offer some customer service assistance, shouted out "Did you remember to plug it in?" Upon hearing this the executioner promptly threw the switch and at 11:10pm Herman Snookerdorance, the "ISP-TOS Killer," was pronounced dead.
His death did nothing to improve ISP customer service but hell, it sure is satisfying to read about it.
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