Mathematicians: Arrogant and useless?

I was innocently reading Planet Gnome, came across this post, followed the link and was instantly insulted:

You're an engineer. You have an important project in front of you thatrequires you to take the derivative of an exponential, but you've forgottenhow. So you find a mathematician and ask him. The mathematician tells youto enroll in his semester-long calculus class, and that somewhere in themiddle, you'll learn how to take the derivative of an exponential.

[...]

Most online help for software is like our mathematician: arrogant andcondescending, long-winded where it's not needed, short-winded where itis needed, and ultimately useless.

While I understand, what the author of that page wants to say, I have to say (from personal experience) that mathematicians are no more arrogant than other people, and are by far not useless!