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Council member: I heard you need my John Doe on something.
Clerk: I need your signature on some documents.
Council member: Yeah, my John Doe.
Clerk, laughing: You mean your John Hancock — John Doe is an anonymous dead body. [Council member looks puzzled.] John Hancock has the biggest signature on the Declaration of Independence — that's where the term comes from.
Council member: Oh.

City Hall
San Francisco, California

This exchange was posted today on Overheard in the Office, a once-clever repository of quips and comebacks which has transformed into a vault of urban legends forwarded by people still using AOL. Still, this "council member" piqued our curiosity. We suspect the submitter meant our city's Board of Supervisors. So which San Francisco supervisor mixed up his or her Hancocks and Does? Well, in order to answer that, you'll need to know who the hell these people are. Here's a primer:

There are eleven members of the Board of Supervisors. It includes three women, three guys with unfortunate facial hair, one guy who looks like a network TV anchorman, and one bald fat fellow. No longer included is former supervisor Ed Jew (who, by the way, is Asian, and not, to my knowledge, Jewish), elected to represent the Sunset district while, a pending case alleges, he was secretly living in Burlingame, a suburb near the airport. None of these people, to my knowledge, had an affair with god-mayor Gavin Newsom while married to his campaign manager.

Other than that? Not much to write home about. They're San Francisco supervisors. The only thing they've done that has influenced tech is kill the citywide Wi-Fi deal. For my money, any of these boneheads could be the culprit. Why does the smartest city on the planet have the dumbest people running it?