For example: cheevo.

Today’s PA strip (which, for those of you lacking context, is a joke about the recently-announced mild price hike for Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold online gaming-and-other-stuff service) brought the word to my attention.

A bit about video game context

Cheevo is shorthand for “achievement”, where (again with the context) an achievement in gaming contexts is some sort of badge-of-honor, otherwise valueless, that recognizes publicly that you have accomplished one or another varyingly difficult tasks in any given game. Kill your thousandth zombie? Achievement unlocked! Escape the sandmines without dying once? Achievement unlocked!

It’s an effective reward system for keeping players more engaged — or engaged longer — in the games they play. Microsoft didn’t invent the idea, but they were instrumental in mainstreaming it with the Xbox Live platform, and now basically any online-capable game platform and even many stand-alone games deploy some sort of achievement system. Parodic metacommentary games have been made. Ostensibly non-game mobile apps like Foursquare have used achievements to motivate users to stay active. Andy Baio, waxy of waxy.org, gave a great talk about gamic motivation earlier this year. The concept of achievement-like systems as abstract motivation for tasks, gaming or otherwise, has permeated the tech periphery of pop culture pretty thoroughly over the last few years.

And while the name may vary from system to system (Playstation maker Sony offers “trophies”, for example, while Foursquare offers “badges”), the name “achievement” has pretty much become the standard reference for all such rewards.

Cheevo?

But, so, yes, to cheevo: I read the strip and got to wondering just where the hell that came from, and when.

That the word exists is no surprise: gamers abbreviate and nickname and jargonize as much as any other group, and maybe more so historically than average given the need in online games to communicate with a minimum of keystrokes to keep one’s twitch muscles available for actual shooting/jumping/spellcasting/etc.

“Cheevo” has a entirely buyable ring to it: it’s kind of twee, sure, but it’s also snappy and easy to connect to the word its derived from, and anyway using a word because you know it’s sort of unsettlingly twee is hardly unheard of. So when did it start?

Doing some googling, the oldest cite I could find was this comment from July 5, 2007 on the gaming site joystiq.com by user “xenocidic”:

clearly it’s still shrinkwrapped as it doesn’t offer easy cheevo’s for his streak !

It’s worth noting that the actual word “achievement” appears nowhere on that page — xenocidic’s use isn’t set up by a prior use by either post author or fellow commenters. That suggests to me that the word was in circulation at least a bit before this, for the word to get used without comment, but that may be assuming too much about the longevity of any given joystiq thread (the comment came the day after the post and is the second to last in the thread) or the reactivity of the joystiq commenterbase to nonce words.

That xenocidic fellow uses it again on joystiq a month later, 8/8/2007:

why not just learn to play a real guitar …

i mean other than the lack of cheevos ~ why not …

and another user quotes and responds to the comment without blinking one way or the other at the usage.

By mid-november of that year, however, joystiq users have started to respond. In a post about the lack of achievements for ported older games, an unnamed user remarked:

seriously, achievements are addictive. We all know that. Some like to say “it’s supposed to be about the game!”. I have to admit that cheevos are and awesome thing, and make a game more fun for me. Speaking of that… just hit 10 grand last night with Assassin’s Creed! w00t!

Another user responds to the content of that comment and reiterates the “cheevos” usage, but then folks start talking about the usage itself, in a mix of word rage, defense, and just-to-annoy-the-annoyed repetition and intentional usage:

I wish people didn’t use the word ‘cheevos’.

CHEEVOS!!!! CHEEVEROONIES! Maybe something a little more l337 for you? Like cH33v0z! w00t!

Signed:
Cheevie McCheeverson

Cheevos

xenocidic himself speaks up at this point:

@btex, I didn’t like the word ‘cheevos’ either the first time I used it, but it’s really grown on me.

try it out sometime.

If I truly voiced how I felt about the bastardization of the word “Achievement” with “‘cheevos”, I would be accused of being prejudiced.

Oh and I’ve never heard anyone refer to Achievements as ‘cheevos’ but now that I have if I ever hear anyone say it again to me I’ll slit their throat, or just teamkill them repeatedly if it’s in a game.

@ Anticrawl… CHEEVOS! Run and grab the razor!

Another victory for slang and abbreviations!

I agree that these games will be bought and enjoyed by some (especially Psychonauts, which everyone seems to be on about), but I think they could have reaped a much bigger audience by including cheevos.

(yes, I said cheevos).

Cheevos.

And away it goes

Most of the early cites I found in 2007 were on joystiq, so it’s possible that site (and maybe xenocidic specifically) can claim some credit for the rise of the word into cultural ubiquity among videogame chatterboxes. By 2008 and certainly 2009 the word seems to have come into common casual usage in gaming discussions in general; the site cheevos.com exists for cheev-related bragging, useful tarpit Urban Dictionary has an entry from early 2009, and not just commenters but staff writers are using the word in headlines and copy.

But it remains conspicuously jargony as well, enough so that people start forum threads to complain about the usage or to assert (as in this thread from a couple months ago) that “cheevos is not a word and its annoying when people use as a replacement for achievement. Its just aggravating.”

And there’s backlash backlash as well, as in the sorta-activist blog Ch33v0 Unlocked, which embraces the usage (and the not-surprising transfiguration of “cheevo” to elite leet 1337 alphanumeric style) and basically celebrates it about as much as a blogspot blog could hope to.

Which doesn’t stop people from putting up silly toys on the web like I Write Like.

And so you get things like this:

And so I started throwing odd things at it: pictures of infants, pictures of people with odd faces, pictures of things like bananas. It made the babies look awful, the odd people continued looking odd when the site could recognize them as having faces at all, and the banana didn’t get past the initial facial recognition check.

And then I tried throwing a cartoon face at it, and got a glimpse of what’s actually going on: it looks like in20years is just blending one of a handful of pre-rendered facial templates onto the submitted face. I got curious about what all those templates look like, and so I found a very simple line-drawing face via google image search:

…and threw that at the site for each of the possible configurations. The site provides three options for manipulation: gender (male or female), age progression (either 20 or 30 extra years tacked on) and drug addiction (are you methed out?); that’s a total of eight possible output images for the original input, so there’s likely exactly eight pre-rendered source images.

Here’s one of those images, for the Male, 20+, No Drugs configuration:

You can see the face behind the line drawing there, faintly. The aging functionality takes this face and apparently paints it onto the submitted photo, like a kind of high-bit-depth facepaint.

Finding the faces

I wanted a somewhat clearer look at the source images, though, so I took the eight output images, cropped out the extra framing, and did a heavy-handed levels adjustment to produce much higher-contrast images of each.

Here’s the matrix of those images, in two sets, the first with No Drugs and the second with extra addiction.

Male on the left, female on the right, 20+ on the top row and 30+ on the bottom row.

Ditto, with drugs:

So there’s your basic Faces Of Aging. The yes-drugs and no-drugs faces have far more in common with each other as a group than any of the drugs-vs-no-drugs matchups for any age and gender category; gaunt cheeks in the template images and a narrowing of the jaw in the distortion of the source image seem like the main ways in which the software elects to turn someone into an addict.

Facespotting

Of course, the site is also doing some amount of scaling and titling and adjusting for the obliqueness of shots that aren’t perfectly face-forward portraits; to demonstrate this positional work, I threw three slightly modified versions of the line drawing at the site, and produced the following output shots, all at the Male 20 No Drugs configuration:

Tilting the head. The software compensates for rotation in the source photograph.

Head height. The software scales the image vertically/horizontally to roughly match facial dimension.

The most interesting of the bunch — I dislocated the nose of the drawing, and the software interpreted that as an oblique shot, distorting the underlying image a bit to follow the feature as if this was an off-angle portrait.

Add those bits of manipulation to basic x/y positioning within the frame and you’ve got some pretty solid where-to-stick-the-face-paint stuff. That the age manipulation bit is itself so low-tech — just, again, blending one of these template images onto every single face submitted — is sort of a disappointment from an image-processing nerd’s perspective but hardly surprising for a dumb little web toy. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, this thing will do a decent job of making you look like you’ve spent a couple decades smoking either tobacco or crack, depending.

Breaking things

Though while as a toy it works well enough within narrow parameters, it falls down pretty badly on the outliers that the software’s “is this a face” functionality isn’t sufficient to screen out — sure, you can’t do a banana, but you can do a line drawing, and that’s not great since, as above, the results are just a revealing bit of a mess.

You can also do babies:

…which isn’t great either. Or is great, if you want a laugh and don’t mind having it at the expense of in20years.com’s “advanced face detection and morphing technology”. And if ten thousand people link to an awful baby photo on their website, they’re probably laughing right along as well.

Aside from screening failures (line drawings, babies), it’s also possible to produce blending errors; the positional recognition and distortion stuff is pretty good but it’s far from perfect, and so especially in situations where it has to handle more than one kind of distortion and so has more chances to make mistakes, you can get monstrosities like these:

…which, well, heh.

“I should keep track of everything I eat and every time I take a crap.”

With all the barking and trotting alongside and earnest looks, they seemed to be torn between an instinct to protect their home turf and some larger gut loyalty to anything human that might acknowledge and validate their eager presences. I felt like a diplomat, ferried along by an involuntary but respectful armed escort from one checkpoint to another.

Or maybe “…troublesome priest”. Or “meddlesome priest”?

Or possibly pestilent, pestilential, tiresome, meddling, vexing, worrisome, insolent, accursed, cursed, bothersome, dammed [sic], insufferable, or parish priest. It depends on who you google, though “turbulent”, “troublesome”, and “meddlesome” seem to dominate the more direct discussions of Henry’s query and Becket’s death, and to dominate the snowclonish repurposings of same as the results below suggest.

(Or it may have been “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”, according to Edward Grim, but that’s hardly as snappy or as good for riffing. Repeatability is nine tenths of the meme.)

In any case, Henry and Becket are dead and I’m hardly a historical scholar; but the phrase lives on as a popular snowclone, and I am enthusiastic about snowclones indeed, so I decided this morning to do a little googling and put together a list of the first several dozen riffs on this phrase I could find.

In other words, what sorts of things other than priests do folks on the internet wish they could be rid of, and how, exactly, would said folks characterize said non-priests?

OED TUB TIME MACHINE

But first, a little digression. Now, besides being shit at history, I’m the very layest of lay etymologists, so someone with a better grasp of either would be able to provide more clarifying detail here, but one lurking question about the variation in word-choice in the popular phrases is that of whether any given word was contemporary to Henry II when he was committing his sly bedridden speech act in the late 12th C.

The OED’s cites for “turbulent”, for example, only go back to the 16th and 17th century, four hundred years or so after Henry uttered it.

“Troublesome” similarly has plenty of mid-16th century cites, but nothing earlier. “Trouble” itself has cites back to 1230, though, and “some” is an older word still though I’m having trouble making sense of the OED’s citations of this variant of the “-some” suffix form in particular.

“Meddlesome” has nothing before the early 17th, though “meddle” like “trouble” seems to be roughly contemporary to Henry II.

How much of this is a just a natural symptom of relatively poor records before Gutenberg hit the scene in the mid 15th C. I can’t say. I know a whole lot less than I would like about the practicalities of the work the OED and etymologists in general do.

But, in any case, the path from what Henry II did say to what folks are willing to suggest he said is an interestingly twisty one, the road from Early-Middle English (or Anglo Norman or Old French or whatever Henry was shouting in when under the weather and upset at his holy men) probably being as much one of translation as anything. Assuming, again, that he even said this and not what Grim quotes. (Unfortunately, the historical works of Preston & Logan do not address the subject.)

AVOID THE NOID CLERGY

In order to avoid a pile of references to original line, I used the search string “will no one rid me of this” -”priest”, and looked through the first ten or so pages of results.

I’ve organized the results by type — the big three modifiers, miscellaneous other modifiers, and a handful of versions that eschew the modifier entirely in favor of a bare noun phrase, as well as a note about a structural collision.

There’s an interesting variety here. Some citations are explicitly political or bureaucratic in a way that suggests a very strong intentional nod to the historical root (though with varying moral vectors, from “let’s not be hasty or careless with our words” all the way to “for god’s sake, go eliminate the figurative archbishop already”); others are clearly farther from the source, and it’s worth speculating a little about where the reference is a knowing literary play and where it’s a second-hand play on a phrase unmoored from its origins, and to what degree that can be deduced by the form and presentation of the snowclone.

(One otherwise unremarkable citation I saw attributed the line to Shakespeare. It does feel a little Shakespeare-y to me; on the other hand, it doesn’t feel very Twain-y or Franklin-y. There’s a web game waiting to be made here where quotes (actual, apocryphal, or newly fabricated) are presented to the reader who is then asked to pick between which of those three overly-attributed English figures wrote it up. Another day.)

In any case this is necessarily not an exhaustive list of even what google can find; the hitcount for the search is around 13K, and while that is presumably inflated by omitted duplicates and such I don’t have the patience to try and crawl through the whole list. There are no doubt more examples to be found for the intrepid searcher. And now, the list:

MEDDLESOME

meddlesome Duke
meddlesome PIECE
meddlesome Stiftung
meddlesome beast
meddlesome bow
meddlesome judge
meddlesome man
meddlesome marionette
meddlesome monk (a variant quote of Henry II)
meddlesome mouseketeer
meddlesome officer
meddlesome poop
meddlesome problem
meddlesome slump
meddlesome state trooper
meddlesome student worker
meddlesome transcription
meddlesome woodpecker

TROUBLESOME

troublesome Avenger
troublesome Elmendorf
troublesome Friend (of Courtney Cox)
troublesome bitch
troublesome catcher
troublesome chair
troublesome congress
troublesome cough
troublesome government
troublesome hockey player
troublesome lawmaker
troublesome malware
troublesome man
troublesome plugin
troublesome plumber
troublesome pope
troublesome prelate (another variant quote of Henry II)
troublesome press
troublesome weed
troublesome work

TURBULENT

turbulent Democratic Congress
turbulent Loser (of the reality show)
turbulent Prime Minister
turbulent Red
turbulent SFX Deputy Editor
turbulent author
turbulent bird
turbulent central banker
turbulent chancellor
turbulent judge
turbulent penguin
turbulent picnic table
turbulent snow
turbulent splash screen

MISC. MODIFIERS

bothersome 130-pound diabetic
indolent man
irritating modal fallacy
moose-eating harpy bitch
obstructionist Senate
overrated, overblown, omnipresent celluloid stupidity
pestilential beast
stinking town
termagant wife
tiresome coon
ubiqtuitous frontsman
upstart mouse

UNMODIFIED VARIANTS

Dwarf
annoyance
ex-girlfriend
man
stock
access denied

MUHAMMED REFERENCES

There were also many hits for pages using the forms “…woman” or “…daughter of Marwan”, as a point of citation regarding Muhammed and Islam, on any number of pages taking a generally deeply critical stance re: same.

I’m ten-foot-poling that one; I’ll note the curiosity of the structural overlap with the popular rendering of Henry II, but beyond that you’re on your own if you want to explore it. Let me know if you find anything linguistically or historically interesting.

This is the first entry in the worklog, from June 2003, unedited. I had been at this job for about a year at this point.

6/12/03

7:20 am
I’m pretty tired of clarifying with people that I’m not selling anything. Pretty much every time I talk to a receptionist, I say hi, blah blah blah, and they say, but we already have a contract for our printers, and I say, no, when I said market research I meant MARKET FUCKING RESEARCH, and they say oh, hold on, I’ll transfer you.

7:28 am
It bothers me when part of the work I do involves trying to suppress my natural reaction to another person’s reasonable statement.

Consider this: I call some law firm in Chicago, out of the blue — they don’t know me, and there’s a good chance they don’t know my company — and ask to talk to someone who works with their photocopiers and printers. After volleying the sales-call issue, I get transfered to M, who I explain the market research thing to. He then asks me what’s in it for him to take the 2-4 minutes to give me information about his company’s stuff. I till him that he’ll be contributing to the ongoing product development efforts of the companies that make the equipment he has to work with.

This is both the most honest and most reasonable thing I can tell him within the confines of the project rules; it’s not quite the truth, though, since what he could actually get out of it is a couple hundred bucks for going to a focus group week after next. But we don’t want to have people falsifying their answers just to get on to a focus group, so we don’t tell them about the focus group and corresponding cash until they’ve already qualified. (Unless the groups aren’t filling up on schedule, in which case we’re usually cleared to fess up about the focus group when we introduce ourselves. Which, in principle, invalidates our goal of quality data collection, but then we do what the client tells us.)

So I tell M this, and M tells me that he doesn’t feel he can give me his 2-4 minutes today. I say, well thanks for your time, and then I hang up and say, you cock.

But, what the fuck? He’s not a cock. He’s a totally reasonable guy who is no doubt sick of sales calls and probably has a rightfully annoyed attitude towards legitimate (erm) research calls. I call, ask for his time and info, and offer him nothing but a vague sense of participation in the great corporate process in thanks. I would expect anyone who wasn’t exceedingly bored and full of whimsy to say no. It’s the reasonable answer. How does he know, regardless of my assurances, that I’m actually just doing market research? How does he know I’m not HP, being fraudulent? For that matter, how do I know that the info I’m gathering won’t be used in ways I haven’t been told about? (Well, in this particular case, there is almost no info kept except about those who have given out such information specifically after deciding to do the focus group, but that’s not always the case.)

Given the steadily worsening state of corporate responsibility, probably the only sensible rule of thumb for most organization is to declare an outright ban on participation in research studies. Don’t give out free information to a non-verified source; if said source is offering you something in exchange for said information, be doubly cautious.

Which is paranoid, because as far as I can tell the company I work for is actually pretty even-steven and legit about these things, and often times we offer incentives specifically to address the fact that we’re asking some guy to take fifteen minutes out of their day to talk to us. We’ve even done actualy useful, semi-important work for state agencies (on rare occasion).

But even if my company is upstanding and good, most of the work we do is for corporate clients, in wide variety. Ultimately, the data we collect is presented to them — in some cases, they probably recieve not only our analysis but the raw data itself. On the phone, I assure folks that their data is confidential and safe and so on; in the long run, some large computer corporation could take the info we’ve gathered and do nasty marketing things with it, and all my reassurances would be so much bullshit.

And further assuming that my company is straight up and all of our clients behave themselves, what evidence is there that the same is true for all other market research organizations? And who says marketing, advertising and sales organizations won’t pretend to varying degrees to be doing confidential market research and then do their own nasty things with the data? What’s to stop ‘Jeff’ from [company that Josh doesn't work for] from saying, ‘Hi, this is Jeff from [company that Josh works for], doing a study on [whatever Jeff's company is conniving to gain a market at]?’ Nothing but ethical resolve, and I have no confidence in that as a regulatory power in the Free Market. People can and will do anything they can to get ahead, or get their company ahead. Not all people, but many. Enough to erode the trust and good will of everyone else.

So I mostly sympathize and agree with anyone who would rather not take the time and risk to talk to me for a few minutes on a cold call for no stated compensation.

But it isn’t my job to be sympathetic to that notion. It’s specifically my job to try and overrule and persuade my way around that notion. The most productive interviewer is one who is unconcerned with the respondent’s desire to get off the phone. (Then again, that sort of short-term success leads in the long run to greater negativity toward the calling company and toward companies in general who call up on the phone.)

Rock, hard place. This is one of the fundamental things I don’t like about this job, then.

8:20 am
This is the best hold music ever: silence. It doesn’t get stuck in my head, it doesn’t annoy me every fifteen seconds with feedback. It just sits quietly with me and lets me think.

I’m calling the Schaefer Athletic Complex. Sounds like a sociological disorder.

8:23 am
Our sample-management scheme is kind of like a Wiki. Interesting that I never thought of it that way. Anybody on a project can, in their turn, edit any part of the company information that we all rely on to do our jobs. If I were so inclined, I could go on a campaign of name-changing, or phone-number altering, or creating of fictional job titles, or whatever. So could anyone else. A person could snap and start deleting all the information from each piece of sample in the database. It probably wouldn’t be unrecoverable — there are no doubt backups (well, little doubt) on a daily basis, and even if there weren’t we could always just reload the sample as was done at the beginning of the project. Still, it would be an awful mess (and someone would get canned in two seconds flat, of course).

But a more subtle attack, a guerilla campaign of occaional changes and minor edits, would probably go unnoticed. If something isn’t very obviously wrong, it probably won’t be noticed by most of the interviewers. This is partly because, on most projects, the communication between all the members of the interviewing staff is minimal. We’re not a tight-knit group of people working in tandem; we’re a loose collection of people working in a variety of styles that often contradict each other. To my knowledge, I’m pretty much the only person who regularly queries other interviewers and supervisors about anomalous sample. So it could be done. But then, what is the benefit? Anything suitably subtle would have little capacity to induce anarchy or even entertain other interviewers — and the chances of getting a joke across to a lot of folks are low, for a variety of reasons — and in the end it’ll all get deleted anyway.

In that sense, our sample is more durable than a random community Wiki, because there’s a strong financial incentive not to fuck everything up which doesn’t exist for random shits on the Internet. But then, our Wiki has no hyperlinks, a terrible interface, and the dullest content ever.

8:49 am
There are a lot of these King Sooper places in Denver. They’re pretty clearly not large office places, so they don’t really have much of any office equipment and, as a given I think, no document-delivery scanning devices on an intranet.

So why are we calling them? Oh, right. Because it’s cheaper (or at least percieved to be cheaper) to pay a bunch of interviewers to slog through a very general collection of business numbers than to go to the trouble of pre-filtering those businesses according to the project.

I say, have a means of knowing that in Denver King Soopers is a restaurant chain, and won’t have any networked scanning infrastructure, and so shouldn’t be in the sample several times for several different stores. Repeat for other relevant businesses in the area.

We don’t actually maintain our own list of companies all over the US for use on these projects. (Which is not to say we don’t have an extensive database of businesses and contacts; we just don’t use them for this sort of general project, and it’s not as extensive as it’d need to be if we were going to.) We purchase sample from a number of different sources, in a number of different formats, according to cost and need. Sometimes we’ll get very well-targeted sample, for businesses of such-and-such size, in industry foo, in some specific geographic region. However, that’s a lot more expensive than most schemes, so if the client isn’t going to pay for that, or there isn’t a need for that much accuracy, we’ll get more general sample. Maybe just (to be topical) businesses of any size in Denver and Chicago. Maybe just businesses smaller than 500 in the US. Maybe (and this is mostly for consumer work, when we’re calling poor bastards at home during dinner) just essentially-random numbers all over the US.

It’s a decision that is based on the percieved needs and wants of the client and whoever from our company is helping get the project off the ground. While the wisdom of any given decision is probably hard to determine, the direct affect on us interviewers is pretty damn obvious. More targeted sample is a hell of a lot easier to work with. If I can call a company for the first time and ask for Dick Monkey, the IT Manager, the receptionist will usually be a lot more, uh, receptive than if I ask for Whoever Handles Your Copiers. Which, in turn, is better than randomly canvassing homes in search of 18-25 year old non-professional hobbyist programmers.

However, it is clear that the mental wellfare of the folks doing the interviewing is the absolute lowest priority in the whole research process.

9:22 am
That’s more than 1800 words I’ve written this morning, inside of two hours while doing my job. Granted, it’s been a pretty slow morning on the phone, but still. Clearly, if I want to make significant progress writing at work during the day, I have the capability. Ranting is easier than writing fiction, but when I’m really into it writing fiction is just like ranting, so there you go.

The only problem with creative writing at work is that the constant interruptions could be awfully frustrating. It’s not a big deal when I have to stop a paragraph like this in mid-sentence; I can pick up where I left off easily. But if I’m in the middle of actually forging a sentence from the mud of the earth, so to speak, and I get interrupted for five or ten minutes, I might easily forget what I was trying to accomplish. That’s no good. Can’t really complain, though, about less-than-ideal conditions for surreptitious writing on work time. Furtive [Furtive? How the hell did I come up with that? I mean, it's a god word, but I had to look it up right now to remember what it means.] creation.

9:33 am
The recent drought of work seems to have ended; about two dozen folks are being briefed on new projects this morning. While it’s a little flattering and reassuring to know that, when work is scarce, I’m one of the folks who they still bring in, there’s a dark side to that — someone who they consider to be a very good interviewer may be someone they are less likely to assign other tasks to. I don’t think that was a factor in me not getting either of the two positions I didn’t get in the last few months, but I can’t know that for sure.

And here’s another thing that causes me conflict. Assuming that I’ll be at the company for a while, and won’t be jumping into a different position altogether, I’d like to have some other responsibilities than just interviewing. Monitoring, confirmation calls, whatever — something to change things up. So, in that sense, I should probably put in the word that, hey, I really would like to be considered for that sort of training.

On the other hand, I don’t really feel good about operating under the assumption that I’ll be here indefinitely. I don’t like my job, clearly. I suppose it’s possible that I would like a job other than my job, but do I have the patience to stay on here (as a temp!) for several years in hopes of moving up? I don’t think that I do. And so it almost feels like committing myself to a path I don’t want to follow, if I try and pursue further and varied training.

Which, I guess, is a sign of some hint of ethical behavior on my part. There’s nothing to stop me from pursuing training and then inconveniencing the staff here by bailing shortly thereafter. But I can’t help but feel that would be sort of shitty, and so I’m reticent from doing so even accidentally. Which, I think, is maybe very suckerish of me.

9:56 am
L’escargot.

Also, good morning and thank you for calling Blue Plate Catering. To speak to the operator, please say ‘yes’ at the tone.

10:28 am
Having already established that there are a number of King Sooper stores in Denver, I would like to declare that there are also numerous Osco stores. Whee.

I’m hungry. Half an hour until lunch. I should really make a point of stocking snacks, for just this sort of situation.

Also, I sure say ‘really’ a lot.

10:38 am
24 minutes to lunch. The clock on my Palm is not quite in sync with work. Perhaps I will change that right now.

10:38 am
Done and done.

10:45 am
Joy of joys, it’s another Osco.

Switchboard operators at hotels always claim pleasure when they transfer my calls. “Can I have Mike Jones,” I say, and the operators says, “My pleasure.”

I realize the implication is probably that it is not only a bother to her to transfer my call — she actually is happy to do so. But it’s sort of weird. You don’t hear people talking about “pleasure” so much in general these days. Seems, to me, like the word is falling out of use. I associate the word mostly with euphamism at this point. Pleasure yourself. Pleasure palace. Etc. But this operator lady is bringing it up in the middle of a phone call.

Here’s a parallel: expressing disrespect for someone or some process by miming the jack-off motion. Pleasuring yerself, again. So, maybe “My pleasure” is a cynical euphamism. Which is probably a ridiculous theory, but the end result is probably truthful — when a receptionist says My Pleasure, they sure as hell aren’t particularly overjoyed to be able to transfer your call, except insofar as they’d rather have you not be on the phone with them.

11:02 am
Changed my mind. 28 minutes until lunch.

Thing that annoys me: when a receptionist repeats back to me what I just said, in a questioning tone — “Management Services, please” responded to with “Management Services?” — but not because she actually needs clarification. Just as, I don’t know, stalling time while she looks it up. So then I start to say, “yes” or explain, but then she’s interrupting me to say “I’ll transfer you” or “please hold” and then transferring me. I hate that.

(However, I’m pretty consistently amused by receptionists who cut themselves off in mid-statement. It ends coming out like “please ho–” or “My pleasure to tra–”. It’s fun to imagine they didn’t actually transfer me, they just saw something awe-inspiring and were struck dumb. (Though a lot of them seem to be fairly dumb already, yuk yuk.))

11:12 am
I wonder if there are contests for worst hold music. What I’m listening wouldn’t win, but it’d be a contender. Bonus points for the heavy reverb on the lite-jazz marimba synth solo.

11:15 am
Tim just donated his lunch to the sewer system. He’s having a hell of a week. I’d like to take this opportunity to retract any comments that suggest that getting sick would be a good plan for getting out of the office.

And poor me, there goes my conversation partner for the rest of the day. I suppose I’ll just type a bunch more.

12:03 pm
Lunch is now just a warm, spicy memory in my stomach. I’m getting perilously close to the end of Shadow Puppets, so I think I’ll refrain from reading it during my last break. Might not finish, certainly won’t have digesting time.

Overheard: “If my kid is in the street, I give ‘em a whuppin’!” Nice parenting.

I’ve overheard a lot of parents sounding like idiots, today. One girl was on the phone with, apparently, her son. She was insisting that he put his dad on the phone, and he seemed to not be doing so, and so she was basically having a pointless argument with a young child. And losing.

And someone else was implying that it was basically physically impossible for a child to have a conversation with a person in a car without there being something horrible afoot.

12:30 pm
It’s 12:30.

Something I like: phone directories that say “zed” instead of “zee”. I realize this wouldn’t be so novel outside of the US, but, hey, I don’t live outside of the US.

1:46 pm
Just wrote something called “Aesthete.” I like just writing short, random things without having a plan, but I worry about them coming off as awful. But, whatever, writing is writing. If I begin to worry less about awfulness, maybe that means it’s paying off.

Another thing I like: using the magnet in the speaker part of the phone’s handset to disrupt the magnetic field of my monitor’s cathode ray tube. The magnet in the phone isn’t too shabby at all; I remember, years ago, using lesser magnets to serious mess with the screens of old monitors. This was when I was working with Damon for the Multnomah Education Services District. We stripped down donated computers (mostly 286s and 386s, some working, some very much not), put together salvaged complete systems, and trashed everything that wasn’t worth not trashing. To this end, we had an excellent trash compactor at our disposal, a fifteen-foot-long tube with a yawning green mouth. We’d haul a bunch of boxes and monitors out to the compactor and take turns chucking them down into its mouth as hard as we could, hoping to get things to break or crack or explode. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

I have no idea how that paragraph started. Lemme go look.

Right. Magnets. We took apart some drives and salvaged some nifty magnetic bits, which we at one point held against the screen of a trash monitor for a minute or so, leaving an apparently permantent six-petaled flower of colorful magnetic distortion behind. It was a neat discovery, to me. Cemented the practical idea of magnetic fields in my mind.

It’s weird to me that most of the people in this office probably have no idea how a CRT works, or why putting the phone near the monitor would cause weird things to happen.

When I think about stuff like that, it’s really easy for me to get unhealthily self-righteous. Like, why should I, who knows a lot of trivial technical details about some things, not be treated with elevated respect and care as a result? Right. Considering the amount of time I spend bitching about my coworkers, I really ought to make it clear that they aren’t, in fact, a bunch of irredeemable jackasses. Some of them, in specific cases, certainly act like it, and I think in general there’s a lot less thought put into making things work for the entire interviewing team, but most of these folks are pretty decent people. Most of what comes out of me, in terms of broad, vague invective, is more a matter of perception on my part than an essential shitheadedness on theirs.

Which is not to say that some specific people don’t do really stupid or ignorant shit in specific cases.

End of disclaimer.

2:45 pm
One of my favorite quasi-supervisory people here is back in the office after being gone for a couple days — I had heard reference to her being ‘on vacation’ and had figured she was just kicking back for a few days. She’s back today, and I’ve seen her crying a couple times already, so I’m thinking vacation was definitely euphamism. The things is, know nothing about her or any of her relationships or background. The obvious guess is that someone died, but I have no idea if that’s a parent, a lover, a pet, or what. And I feel kind of weird about broaching the subject, especially when she seems to be getting a lot of support from people who’ve been here for years and know her a lot better. Something questionable about dropping by and saying, “hey, you look like the shit hit the fan. Sup?”

But I figure maybe I should anyway. Grab your balls and jump in, as Emma Howell once said. (Rather a different context, perhaps, but the sentiment translates.)

And, in other news: [In retrospect, I have no idea if I was just being funny here, or if I actually had something else to say that I completely forgot about.]

2:50 pm
It’s almost that magical sample-error time. Though I have no idea if it’ll be a problem again today. The project supervisor mentioned that the programmer dudes added a bunch of sample recently, so my dreams may well have been shattered. We’ll know soon.

Also, one of my cube-mates [Er, cube-neighbors? There is no good word for expressing this specific relationship.] donated a half a patty melt on rye to the Randomly Giving Josh Food fund. I’m not so hot on rye, but it was random and free and I am a big fan of patties, and of melting. Hopefully I can knosh on it during the sample minefield.

3:04 pm
Yep. Slack. Though the supervisor told us they do have some new sample; it’s just not loaded yet. Ah, well, it couldn’t last.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

- Voltaire, Épître à l’Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs

If [John F. Kennedy] didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and then shoot him.

- Rob Sheffield, Vanity Fair

The following is a list of some of the people, groups, places, and varyingly abstract concepts that folks on the internet believe would need to be, in the case of their non-existence, invented, according to Google.

I searched only for cases that matched the (seemingly canonical) English translation that leads this post; there are more lax forms, e.g. “…we’d have to invent him”, that turn up many additional hits if you care to go looking, but I wanted to keep things simple and go for the (arbitrarily?) pure snowclone with this one.

It’s interesting that the intention of any given citation may vary: in some cases (especially with political figures) it seems mostly to be used as a jab at the named figure, or at those who depend on that named figure or group for fodder; with less political figures, it tends to be more of a neutral or even laudatory expression.

The list, in as-the-hits-arrived order:

God
The Twenty-First Century
Osama bin Laden
Civic Intelligence
DPRK
The Internet
The founders
Stephen King
Old 97s
The Codex Seraphinianus
Mignon Fogarty
Minivans
Hippies
Archivists
Evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci
Donald Trump
This Potato Salad
McCain
The Stig
Tom Waits
Joe Lieberman
Ayn Rand
Al Qaeda
Rock Bottom
P.Z. Myers
McDonalds
This website
The PC Controversy
The Mafia
In-ear monitors
Manchester United
William “The Refrigerator” Perry
Christmas
Spacetime
Etruscan
Hong Kong
Mobile telephony
Homosexuals
The Roman Empire

This is from a scan of the first fifteen or so pages of a google search for “abc. always be” -”always be closing”, sorted into a few categories, looking at how people use the “ABC: Always Be x” template as a snowclone.

-ing forms:

Calling
Canceling
Capturing
Cartooning
Casting
Celebrating
Challenging Yourself
Charging
Clicking
Cobbling
Collecting
Combining
Communicating
Compounding
Conditioning
Connecting
Conning
Constructing Business Models
Contacting
Cosplaying
Crafting
Creating
Crediting
Crouching
Curling
Cutting

Things that aren’t an -ing form:

Calm
Careful
Cautious
Certain
Cheerful
Classy
Clean
Cleared
Comfortable
Concise
Confident
Congruent
Conservative
Cool
Courteous
Covert
Cute

Things that don’t start with C:

Base-Closing
In Control
Promoting

Things that probably weren’t supposed to start with C but who knows really:

Cprepared

Go check out Inchoatery!

I’ve also written up a bit about the challenges of pretending to be a whole rock band as a solo musician, in a blog post over on the music site titled The Lonely Iterator.