Today's Topic: Dividing by Zero

At work the other day, this guy came up to me and asked, "What do you get when you divide by zero?"      Thinking he was joking, I answered, "I don’t know. A brain hemorrhage?"      "No, seriously."      I paused. "Well, you don’t get anything because you can’t divide by zero."      "That’s not right," he said, and walked away. I thought perhaps I had misunderstood him, but I listened as he asked another person the exact same question and began explaining how it could be done.      Dividing by zero isn't possible because you need something to divide with. Saying that you are going to divide by zero is like saying that you are going to slice up a birthday cake but you have lost the knife. The only difference is that with an uncut birthday cake you end up with a bunch of whining children and when you try to divide by zero, it's just me who whines.      Let’s take the following sentence and break it down: "We are going to divide by zero."          "We are going to" -- A bunch of us got together to perform an activity.          "divide" -- The thing we are going to do is divide.          "by zero." -- But we chickened out.      They tell you that you should choose your battles. This is my kind of battle -- a quarrel over an entirely insignificant issue that I should just leave alone. So, I walked over to the cubicle where the gentleman was performing his numerical magic, hoping that I could help him to see the error of his ways.      Before I said anything, I stopped and listened to him explain division by zero to another cubicle dweller. I was surprised to find that divide-by-zero guy acheived numerical results, like "five." It was a stunning achievement.      When he was through, I tried to explain to him, as I have explained to you, that you can’t divide by zero. He let me get clear through my statement, but I must have left out some key point. I say this because he stared blankly at me for a second and then restated his explanation exactly as before. Normally this is when I resort to name-calling, but instead I turned to the person he had been talking to and demonstrated that if you multiply two times two, you get a totally different result than you would if you add two plus two. What the hell. If you can’t beat ‘em...      The next day the divide-by-zero guy got a job in accounting. They heard he was good at manipulating numbers. I suspect he'll have a 200 percent error rate.