I almost got myself killed once and have never written how.
I was just grabbing a soda from the machine here at work. It’s a slow afternoon the day before Thanksgiving, and I was thinking to myself that I really should quit drinking soda, it’ll kill me some day. Actually, it almost did kill me one day. Kind of.
In the spring of 1996, I was a middling to underachieving high school junior. One school day in June during the last week of finals the weather was so excellent that my friends and I opted to spend the afternoon at a picnic table at the end of a path through a wooded half acre that bordered the tennis courts that marked the school limits, across a corn field, near a small creek that ran behind the school grounds.
Third and fourth periods at the end of the semester have nothing on smoking cigarettes with friends at 16. At the end of the afternoon I could ride the bus home, or I could catch a ride with a friend that was not skipping class with us.
But first, I wanted to get a coke. There were two coke machines in the school, and I opted for the one closest to the parking lot at the risk of being spotted by the teachers from my afternoon classes. The halls were crowded with students dumping books into lockers, heading for the doorways to the rest of their afternoons. I was going against traffic at first, then with traffic as as I reached the midpoint between the parking lot door I’d entered through and the bus driveway doors.
I got my coke and reversed course. As was my habit, I tapped the pull-tab with the pad of my right thumb while holding the can in my left during my walk back up the hall. I pushed through the door with dozens of other students back out into the sun I’d enjoyed all afternoon, still tapping the pull-tab on my can of coke.
“So what do I do now?”
There were three cards face down on my lap. I was holding most of a deck of red bicycles. I looked up at my interrogator, a family friend, and tried to remember how far I was along in the trick.
“Uhm…”
I’d learned this trick a few months prior. Use any old deck of cards, jokers in or out, and fan the deck. Offer the subject a card, any card. Ask them to memorize the card. Cut the deck. Place the memorized card back in the cut deck. Shuffle the deck a few times for show, then place the top three cards side by side on a flat surface and ask the subject to pick the one that is their card. They will be wrong. Offer them a second chance. They will be wrong again. Give them the last face down card, which again won’t be their card. Then peel off the top card from the remaining deck. It is their card!
I don’t remember the magic part that moved the card to the fourth from the top position.
I didn’t remember then either.
“What happens next in the trick?”
I looked around for help. I was definitely in a hospital, and there were definitely my parents and a few aunts and uncles outside the door.
“What happened? Why am I in a hospital? What’s going on?”
There was immediately, as I recall it, commotion. I was surrounded by faces.
“Grant, you were in an accident, you are in the hospital, you hurt your head.” someone said.
“Lets move him”
My bed was reclined to nearly flat and the ceiling started sliding from left to right above me, and then from down to up.
“Hey Grant, we all ditched to come up and see you. You looked fucked up man.”
Some of the friends I’d been with that afternoon had come to see me. I was in a room by myself. Some time after they left, a second group of friends stopped by. Family was in and out. The right side of my head was shaved completely, the left was not. My Minor Threat t-shirt was gone, my favorite pair of Vans were gone, my jeans were gone.
From then on, my memory is complete. There is no blacked out gap during which the catheter was removed. There is no blacked out gap failing to store the first time I got out of bed in a few days to walk, with help, to the bathroom, in long term memory. I spent the rest of the hospital stay finishing Stephen King’s The Green Mile serials which family had brought me, having visitors, dozing, and trying not to upset the scabs on my heels, right hip, and right shoulder. All left scars.
I have since been told from multiple people what had happened to me, but not from any actual witnesses. I’ve been told what probably happened though. I’ve been told what the EMTs did when they arrived, where the helicopter picked me up, how I almost left the hospital that evening before losing my lunch in the lobby, and how I was awake and conversing almost the entire time.
The funny thing about memory is that each of these stories I’ve been told has been stitched into my memory alongside the events I witnessed. My brain has no problem continuing the narrative after I opened the coke that afternoon outside high school and saw a friend in the parking lot, pulling his car around. My brain has fabricated the precise point in the hospital that my parents and I decided to go back in and ask for a head scan to figure out why I was vomiting. My brain has filled in the doctors telling me I have a subdural hematoma and describing the baseball-stitched scars the operation will leave on my head.
But I don’t trust any of it. The only reason I don’t trust any of it is that I remember where the gaps started. I remember the gaps, and I remember each source that filled in their version of the events that have since filled them. There is no other obvious tell. All long term memories are brief episodes bordered by gaps, and these fabricated ones aren’t any different.
As time passes, these distinctions are blurring. Maybe I am gradually recalling the waking moments of that afternoon and these are genuine memories being reconnected through the suggestion of hearing them from others?
I don’t believe that. None of the resurfacing memories have been contradictory to the suggested versions. Isn’t that strange considering I was the only witness?
The brain is amazing.
When I am a tottering old man, be wary of my telling of this story with no gaps, as I likely will. I will have forgotten the second black out, as I tend to do already. I will never forget the card trick. My long term memory kicking-in mid-card trick is the most surreal thing to ever happen to me.
In my class tonight, the professor lectured about communications. When she got to the bit about body language and oh if you cross your arms like so, it is communicating that you are closed off, one of my classmates pointed out that many of the theories of body language are based on bad research from the 1960’s and 70’s, pop psychology, and folk wisdom.
He was, of course, right.
The common set of most of the knowledge we walk around with is blurred with inaccurate folk knowledge. No field is immune.
Everything I know about passwords? Wrong. Misguided. Soon to be out-dated.
Literary analysis? Not my specialty.
Communications? Sorry, my community college class doesn’t help.
Music? Ha.
Getting by with a mix of real knowledge and folk wisdom in any field is only natural. True depth in anything requires, on average, about $1000 investment value in equipment, reading, classes, and so on, and ten years practice. Well, about ten years, some are slower or faster than others. And far too many chase the dollar investment thinking it’ll make up for the ten years thing. And even then, the conventional wisdom baggage never goes away.
Nothing is immune until humanity gets the brain-in-a-vat thing figured out.
So this poor classmate of mine points out, in a largish university class, this concept, and that it has blurred the lines between what is true researched body language, and what is hearsay.
The teacher is pretty sure about the whole arm crossing thing. Pretty sure. Another classmate is a psychology major and asserts that body language does exist, but that not everyone has the same body language. Another classmate asserts that body language is reliable and that they use it at work. Another classmate is open to the idea that body language is different for everybody, but points out that kids do the arm crossing thing.
The entire time these bastards are berating the man for what they seemed to understand as his dismissal of body language entirely, I’m watching him. Watching his body language.
He wanted to cross his arms.
He didn’t. That would be giving in.
I knew this like I imagine poker players know each other’s tells after years of playing together. He wanted to cross his arms and swivel his chair so that he would no longer be directly shoulders-square with the rest of us.
That I knew this, because he was being lectured to by a class full of students, wasn’t the interesting thing. What intrigues me now, an hour later, is that I knew he knew that we knew that he knew.
Outlook error messages must be Zen Kōans. There simply isn’t a rational explanation for a mature product to be so full of useless, annoying alerts.
The Evidence
Meet the Cannot Family
The function cannot be performed because the message has been changed.
Changes to the meeting cannot be saved. The meeting has been updated by another person. Close and reopen the meeting, and then make your updates.
The form required to view this message cannot be displayed. Contact your administrator.
The OK button only makes the messages worse.
If a dialog can only be dismissed with a single response, it should not exist, because it is no longer a dialog. Well, obviously you say, it is an alert!
The item cannot be moved. It was either already moved or deleted, or access was denied.
And it’s twin.
The item cannot be deleted. It was either moved or already deleted, or access was denied.
And the twins’s over-grown, uglier cousin
Some items cannot be deleted. They were either moved or already deleted, or access was denied.
Yikes, any developer that adds ASCII art (> >) to a graphical interface should have his or her commit privileges revoked.
How about a bulleted list?
Cannot mark the items read or unread. The most likely reasons are:
You don’t have permission to modify the items.
These folders do not support marking items as read or unread.
You did not select anything to mark.
The server is unavailable.
Cannot turn off the reminder. You may be reminded again.
Really? May I please?
On Time
Opening a lot of items could take some time. Are you sure you want to open these items?
Some time?
Here is a dialog takes about 30 seconds to arrive, during which the entire interface is frozen.
Cannot find file ‘\\network\path\that\is\not\available’. Verify the path or Internet address is correct.
While this similar dialog, I think indicating that the browser isn’t ready, times out in a few seconds with the following useful error.
General failure. The URL was: “http://theurl.tld/long/truncated/url/?ohpleasekillme…”. The system cannot find the file specified.
On matters of temporary files
The attachments of the message “” have been changed.
Do you want to save changes to this message?
What is the difference between No and Cancel?
A program has the attachment open. Changes to the file will be lost unless you save your changes to another file by clicking the Microsoft Office Button in the other program, and then clicking Save As.
Inhumane by any measure
Unknown Error.
A dialog box is open. Close it and try again.
Simply amazing.
The frequency a dialog is likely to present itself in QA is directly proportional to the quality of the alert text.
Share this Calendar with User, Joe
<joe.user@grantstavely.com>?
Your Calendar has been shared with User, Joe. <joe.user@grantstavely.com>. User, Joe has also granted you access to their calendar and it has been added to the Navigation Pane in your Calendar.
There are also a few nice messages hidden in the UI that obscure needless complexity
Extra line breaks in this message were removed.
And it’s counterpart…
This message has extra line breaks.
Ugh.
This item canot be displayed in the Reading Pane. Open the item to read its contents.
Informational Wordiness
Your server administrator has limited the number of items you can open simultaneously. Try closing messages you have opened or removing attachments and images from unsent messages you are composing.
Language shift is unavoidable, and passing fads of cultural catch phrases and idioms are to be enjoyed. Word's meanings shift, begin to lose force, take on secondary contrary meanings, and eventually come to mean something wholly different. Idioms that become popular in one field may cross to join the confusing jargon of business analysis, or of political discourse, or of art, and so on.
Some are becoming ambiguously hyperbolic jumbles. Ranting about these is silly, but given the shifts they are undergoing, perhaps they are best avoided in your writing.
What?
A Perfect Storm has become the new "we believe we have found all factors leading to the undesired event, and most of them were somewhat undesirable themselves." It is a complex world and many of our systems are tightly linked, that does not make every event a perfect storm.
Carrot and Stick is a nice idiom: influence others by withholding a promised reward; as when dangling a carrot from a stick in front of a donkey. It is shifting to suggest influencing others by alternating between delivering a promised reward when small goals are met and punishing with a big stick when small goals are not met.
Sea Change isn't just a morose Beck album, it is from Shakespeare's Tempest:
"Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell."
That sounds like a classical metamorphosis to me, not something one experiences when taking on a new job, or doing the same job in a slightly different environment.
Decimate now needs to be used with supporting evidence or abandoned until it has fully lost it's one-tenth reduction meaning and finally rests as a synonym for annihilated.
Lost Battles
The pronunciation of nuclear wants to change to nukular very badly. Nuclaer is awkward; the hard stop of the 'c' using the back of the tounge is followed by the 'l' formed with the front of the tounge – unavoidably prone to shift.
A martini has become a call drink; with so many drinks ending in -tini and the blur between vodka and gin, abandon all hope of restoring the proper gin to vermouth ratio and order a Hendricks-rocks.
So?
Language change tends to slow, I'm told, as literacy rates increase. With just-in-time learning, will this slow even further? No more will we have to guess at what it means to throw someone under the bus, we can Google it.
Did you think I actually knew that Tempest passage?
