Man booted from airplane for wearing anti-TSA shirt — RT

Man booted from airplane for wearing anti-TSA shirt — RT.

What the TSA provides is twofold:

  • Security Theater
  • Technology Recycling

For the first part, the Security Theater, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a big show to make people feel safe. Not actually safe, but just the impression that someone seriously is quite serious and taking a serious look into serious things that seriously bother serious people. Seriously. But it’s a sham and we all know it. So we take off our shoes because they could be bombs and somehow in some world liquids smaller than three ounces couldn’t possibly be a hazard. Then we are invited to walk into a machine that is supposed to scan us for security threats on our body. A machine that uses radiation that has not been proven by the FDA to be safe for use. These machines are provided to the TSA by the minimum quoted provider. Who is to say what that machine actually does! Do you see an FDA seal on it? Do you know it’s safe? Do you really trust people who are putting on a show to actually know what the big plastic metal machine does? I always (and always will) elect for the enhanced pat-down. I understand it’s part of the security theater and I don’t want to get in the TSA’s face when it comes to rubbing their noses in it, but come on people! What it really comes down to is the ultimate failure of permanent vigilance. You can’t remain permanently vigilant. You can see it popping up left and right. Guns geting passed through X-Ray scanners, TSA agents falling asleep on the job, TSA agents leaving detectors unplugged for half the day. You can’t eliminate accidents or stupidity. No ruleset exists that people come into contact with that ensures 100% compliance all the time. Human beings aren’t built that way. We get bored, we get lazy, we get sleepy. After millions of old ladies, dudes, toddlers, and regular folk – it all tends to just blend together. You look down and notice the bright blue uniform and remember, oh yeah! You’re supposed to be serious!

Then we get to the second part. The technology recycling services the TSA provides. How many people have put expensive bits and pieces in their checked luggage, luggage that the airlines now charge you to carry no less, only to arrive at your destination finding your expensive bits and pieces are now gone? If you are lucky you get a length of TSA tape that indicates that some mystery bumpkin was pawing through your belongings. That’s why, when I fly, I fly with carry-ons only. Everything worth anything is in my backpack and that never leaves my sight, ever.

All of this is just security theater. I know it is so from direct experience. After recently flying and passing under the watchful always-vigilant eye of the TSA I have noted three discrete incidences where the TSA is just putting on a show. What have I done? Nothing dangerous or hazardous, so don’t get your knickers in a twist, but they did miss several key points which do concern me, in that it shows them for being about as vigilant as my cats are. Here’s what the TSA ignored twice, once at a little airport and once at a big airport:

  1. 4 ounce container of underarm deodorant. This is a gel and therefore falls under the three-ounce rule. Nobody is paying attention to this any longer. I decided I didn’t care if they threw a fit and tossed out my Old Spice deodorant, it was half-gone anyways and I’d be inconvenienced a whole $2.50. Alas, I wasn’t inconvenienced, beyond noting that the three ounce rule is hokum.
  2. 1 Liter Stainless Steel Hydroflask. It passes under X-Rays and it’s STAINLESS STEEL. Nobody has ever asked me to open my bag and show them the flask, or even open it to demonstrate that it’s empty. It is empty, but that’s not the point. The point is, that vigilance is taking a nap.
  3. 20 ounce convention flask. This also passed under X-ray without even a single notice. It too was empty, but what if it wasn’t? That’s 20 ounces of mystery fluid… vigilant, just like my cats.

So what this comes down to is that we are very sold on the notion of McSecurity provided by the TSA. It’s a huge government program that eats up huge government dollars and gets all these companies huge government contracts to build machines that nobody double-checks for efficacy or safety. They look at me, they measure me, they find me non-threatening. I’m just another schlub with a backpack, a roll-aboard, and worn-looking brown shoes. I approach with my United States Passport and I don’t make eye contact. I don’t say anything and my answers are affirmative grunts. All of this is theater. We have a role to play, to be pleasant, pliant, obedient schlubs just shuffling through the great machine being as plain, gray, and uninteresting as possible and their role is to pretend to run big complicated machines and seem strong, superior, and always exude an air of serious menace. That somehow being cold, officious, dour, and oh-so-serious somehow impresses on us all that when we get into a poorly-maintained aircraft with angry poorly paid stewardpeople and pilots that are overworked drunk bus-drivers-in-the-sky that somehow the TSA makes everything oh-so-right.

It’s all pretend. It’s all a big show. It’s nice that they behave the way they do, the way they are told to behave. But the bullshit is thick and smears everything. The fact that airplanes don’t just drop out of the sky all the time is more of a testament to luck than anything else.

When it gets right down to it, when we have to ultimately decide between war, food, and medicine then we’ll see what’s what. When the money runs out to fund this magic McSecurity theater program called the TSA, what then? Will these oh-so-serious, oh-so-dour, super-stalwart, always-vigilant (giggle) watchmen of the folken work for free?

They better work for free. Because Americans are fear-addled pussies who couldn’t possibly handle risk. So we sacrifice our dignity and our honor on the altar of McSecurity Theater. What a wimpy pussed-out lot we are. Seeing demons everywhere. Little brown-skinned demons wearing turbans. Yeah, that’s what it’s really all about. Anyone who says differently probably has stock in the company that builds those cancer scanners they say keeps us all “safe”.

HA HA HA.

National – Marvin Ammori – If You've Ever Sold a Used iPod, You May Have Violated Copyright Law – The Atlantic

National – Marvin Ammori – If You’ve Ever Sold a Used iPod, You May Have Violated Copyright Law – The Atlantic.

Perhaps it’s better to just toss whatever it is in a fire and be done with it. These articles are great guides to see what things to avoid. If you see something with a copyright logo on it, just don’t buy it. The only way to really effect change is to hit these companies where it hurts them the these  most, their bottom line. Just stop buying these things until these companies correct their bad behavior.

In the meantime, since the FBI doesn’t live in anyones pants, we can continue to do what we will despite what some company would like to force us to do otherwise. This is where social networking will provide a way for people to sell what they want and nobody will be able to stop it, even with these silly claims to the contrary. It’s either that, or the Supreme Court could decide, but I doubt that they will.

Publicize!

WordPress just released the ability for me to publicize my blog posts on Tumblr, so this post should end up being linked to Twitter, Facebook, and now Tumblr.

As I do almost all of my blogging on WordPress, this is a good thing. I notice that the different services shine all a little differently. I don’t get any replies on Twitter about my posts, Facebook may earn a comment or a Like, and since I manually haul out to G+, that is its own ball of wax.

Speaking of G+, one thing I have noticed is that people get very bent out of shape when I post a password protected WordPress post to that service, way more than any other service by far. I think it’s because people have taken the art of engagement very seriously over in G+, since it’s not really going to unseat Facebook when it comes to uniq’s. People just don’t seem to understand why, at least on G+, what hides behind those protected posts. I protect them because I have to prevent a certain audience from gaining access to what I write in those posts. There are some people I just can’t trust with ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ so I have to make the posts protected after a fashion. It’s something I never expected that I would have to blog about, but if I do, then the people who throw fits hopefully will read it and understand that their concern is misplaced. The protected posts really aren’t that interesting for regular folken, they are written for a different audience. Close friends and family pretty much, so not being able to see the protected posts really shouldn’t upset you – you aren’t missing anything.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of this whole sharing to Tumblr thing. Frankly my tumblr doesn’t get much traffic or followers. We’ll see.

And for those who continue to read the tripe that I write, I thank you. I promise poor quality and rambling on in the future. Gotta keep up my standards. 🙂

Throw It Back

I used to fret and worry about my relationship with alcohol. What did it mean? Is the drinking itself bad or is it the reason behind the drinking the really bad part? Maybe it was a combination of both. Next month I’ll turn 37 years old and quickly plowing myself into my 40’s. So what preciousness is to save that I’m holding onto?

Americans have a really funny way of dealing with alcohol. We used to love it, then we hated it, then we prohibited it completely and all the while our relationship and use of the substance has not changed. I notice this a lot when I go to purchase alcohol from shops, especially here in Michigan. People are so, I suppose the emotion they must feel is embarrassment, because the shops all reflexively wrap bottles of alcohol in brown paper wrappers. Like it’s shameful or embarrassing to be seen in polite society with a bottle of Jack Daniels, Jamesons, or Captain Morgan. Wine never really got the sharp end of the stick, and neither really did beer. Both of those spirits are too weak to be of mention. You’ll go to the bathroom a lot before you’ll feel much in the way of an effect from those particular drinks. It’s the harder liquors that surprise me. First off, Michigan rigidly controls the price of spirits right down to what retailers are allowed to sell the spirits for. It doesn’t matter who sells what, they all get their prices out of this dog-eared pale-blue booklet that the state hands them. I sometimes wonder why the state of Michigan thinks it’s the sole arbiter of the price and availability of spirits in their state borders? As if they could control their citizenry with laws. Hah. But there it is, artificial price fixing for no good reason. A 750ml bottle of Jameson’s Whiskey is $25 in Michigan and $17 in Illinois. The only reason I’d buy liquor in Michigan is out of laziness.

And as it turns out, my favorite liquors are Jamesons, what a shocker, and as funny as it seems, the low-brow rums, Bacardi’s Oakheart and Newfoundland’s Screech. I don’t really care for the specialty long-aged rums and apparently I prefer just the english-speaking rums of the world, as the rest aren’t very much to my liking. But really where it’s at is my relationship to a bottle of Jamesons.

What is my relationship to alcohol? I drink liberally and I become intoxicated and I enjoy myself. I do not make a mess of myself by drinking beyond my personal limit, nor do I operate any machinery while under the influence. That last bit is a lie, of course, as machinery includes my iPhone and my computer, so a few bouts of drunk twittering won’t send me to jail. I’ve never operated a motor vehicle, and almost always I’m the designated driver because, well, lets face it, I have control and money issues. So back to drinking. It’s a joy. It brings warmth and happiness into my life. Not that my life was bereft of warmth and happiness before, but while intoxicated it makes many things feel better. Many things are easier to cope with. I wear my emotions on my sleeve and I share my feelings, some would say, too readily. There was a humorous picture of a boy stating what I often times find myself thinking, especially sober, and that is “We’re all thinking it, I just said it.” So we get down to the reasons why I drink.

I like to drink because it feels good. I like to drink because it tastes good. Wine is principally what I’m getting at, as there is a universe of delicious flavors in wine and more people should go exploring to see what they like. Beer? When I was a kid and very sensitive to bitters, beer was awful. As I age however, beer has become like water. It’s a drink with food, it makes you belch, and makes you have to see a man about a horse quite often. In many ways, beer and wine are somewhat okay ways to replace water, especially if you question the quality of water. I personally have never felt that the water where I live is good for me. Now, before people get really worked up, the gentle reader should be aware that I was raised on the worlds best water. The city supply of Syracuse, New York. That water is drawn from Skaneateles Lake and is some of the best tasting water on the planet. I am sorry that more people don’t understand just how wonderful it is to walk up to the tap in your house, turn it on and be able to drink what comes out without even a single iota of worry, and enjoying the taste, which is the way water should taste. It should not taste like a chlorinated fish bowl. So the water is a big reason for the more simpler spirits. But that doesn’t touch on the stronger ones. Here again I like the taste, or perhaps, in the case of Jamesons, I’m genetically predisposed to enjoy the taste, I do sometimes wonder about that. I also enjoy the feeling it gives me, and then, and what everyone really wants to know, is the social aspects to my alcoholism.

I drink because Hell is other people. This is very general and expansive and it’s not really meant to hurt others feelings, but lets face it, unless I’m in love with you or we are exceptionally close, Sartre’s statement about Hell being other people eventually finds it’s mark. I can endure a lot of things from people, especially when I have no other choice. I can be whatever I need to be to endure the situation. That’s the blessing that comes with a monumentally strong sense of self-monitoring. In work meetings I can be calm and reserved and measured, that sort of thing. Generally however I can’t stand humanity. In all the ways we are unique and special and loving, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the baser things that bother me, the odd behaviors, the many varied ways we abuse each other and in many ways, so effortlessly and lets face it, callously. It can range from being a real prat to being incidentally and nebulously a horrible human being. So what comes of all these unpleasant feelings? Being exposed to people who chew too loudly, snort, wheeze, moan, whine, or in one way or another do whatever they can to be as awful to others as they can, where is there to go? Where can anyone go if they are trapped in that situation? I am forever thankful for alcohol. “Please pass the wine” is a far more pleasant thing to say than dragging out (or dragging up) the varied unpleasantnesses that surround some social situations. I find that it’s almost always more preferable to prepend potentially unpleasant social interactions with a precautionary buffer of alcohol in my system. If I am nursing a beer or a glass of wine, of throwing back shots of Jamesons, I can eventually reach a place where the things that upset me no longer really bother me, and in a way, alcohol makes everything better. So yes, I drink, at least as a partial reason, to cope with the people in my life. I am not going to point fingers at who makes me drink, that would just be courting disaster, but in a general sense, Hell is other people.

So to get back to the beginning, is it a problem? Should I be concerned? The answer is, I don’t give a damn. I’m not going to fret over what drinking means to me, I’m just going to enjoy my life and all the things in it and if I spend my time in a beer bottle or a bottle of Jamesons, then that’s where I want to be. For pleasure, for joy, for happiness, and to escape Hell, at least for a short while. Anything can be endured as long as there is a break to it, a stop, a discontinuity to horribleness. In many ways, alcohol is a blessing to endurance.

International Day of Lying

People need lies. Lies are good.

At least when it comes to your online identity. I’ve been reading a few things here and there with people who are quite upset that Mark Zuckerberg is seeking ways to dodge his fair share of paying taxes and these people are very upset that Facebook is making money off their personal details – their lost privacy.

So how does one regain lost privacy? Simple, lie. Lie right through your teeth. Make lying an art form. Create a fantasy life out of pure whole cloth and make it as bombastic and marvelous as you have creative chops to make it!

In fact I think everyone should do this. Right now. We need a international day of lying. Everyone needs to log in to Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter and go to town. Change the years, fiddle with the places, come up with schools you didn’t attend and live in cities you have no idea about beyond their brief entries in Wikipedia. Make it all random, make it monumental, but above all else, make it a lie. A big beautiful fantastic fabrication!

To that end, I’m going to edit my Facebook to this end. It’s going to feel good. Oh so good. Why don’t you join me? Nothing says pleasure more than wrestling power away from those that do not respect you, like Facebook. And Google. And Twitter. And well, anywhere else really.

Monetize that bullshit. I DARE you!

Of Clouds and Stones

The early 21st Century will be known for the era of cloud computing. Just a little bit of what the cloud can do I’m actually taking advantage of right now as I write this blog post.

Google provided a huge space for people to upload their music and created a handy tool to upload their iTunes music up to Google’s storage system on the network. I took advantage of this offer and copied my entire iTunes library up to Google. That’s of course just half of what I needed to cloudify my entire music collection. I also need a client to play the content on whatever devices I want to use them on. Unfortunately the Google webapp for their Google Music service doesn’t work well on my iOS device, however there is an app called Melodies which does work fantastically well!

This has saved me so much time, expense and bother. Instead of having to buy a device with a big storage unit for my music I can simply stream my music off the network, using Google and Verizon (and Wifi if I have it, and that is almost universally ubiquitous in North America anyways) so now I have nearly universal access to my music, in a way having my cake and eat it too.

This wasn’t always easy, the Melodies app did have an issue with not being able to shuffle properly but after I contacted the app support staff and telling them what was wrong they fixed the app and it updated on my iPhone in a few moments. From that point I have realized something I never thought I’d be able to do, but play my music right off the network. It’s just one more way that devices, storage, computers, all of it are becoming increasingly abstracted away from my computing experience. I expect that sometime soon the notion of a computer will start to erode and evaporate as more and more of my life becomes cloudified, or perhaps the right word is enclouded? Going to have to work on the terminology.

Of course, people who I’ve spoken to about the cloud come up with very familiar complaints as to why they don’t want to join me. Mostly it comes down to a question of privacy, and that they feel the cloud would endanger their sense of privacy. I’ve thought about that point for a while, trying to come up with a position on it. I’ve honestly never really given two shakes about my precious privacy. What value am I coveting? So what if Meijers knows what I buy and when I buy it? So what if Google knows what music I enjoy? So what if I’ve been categorized and indexed? Where is the hazard? People regard privacy as some sort of grail-object. They protect it beyond all rational sense and I don’t think that any of us can maintain any sense of privacy any longer, at least since social networking became a mainstream part of our lives.

But then again, there is the fear. Where does that come from? People hiding who they are, what they think, what they buy from others because we’re afraid of, what exactly? Isn’t it a more comfortable life to simply be who and what you are and let the chips land where they will? A life exposed is a non-issue for those that are proud of who and what they are. I admit to having a definite cavalier attitude when it comes to my privacy, but what the hell do I have to hide? Or any of us? To me it has always been my argument that if I reveal elements of my life to strangers that somehow they’ll take advantage of that information and somehow misuse it or attempt to hurt me. Well, first and foremost they’ll have to endure the social awkwardness of being the ones to expose my “secrets” to everyone else. The key here is to own everything about yourself. Own your passions, own your foibles, and own your mistakes. Nothing about the past means anything, regret is a dull nothing. For example, Anthony Wiener’s crotch-shot being publicized lead to the end of his political career. WHY? I respect people more when they stand up and own whatever it is that others find outrageous. Here’s the thing, none of us are pure. None of us really have any place to stand and throw stones. Even Jesus Christ spoke on this very point. “Let him who hath no sins cast the first stone!” Well? So you have a picture of your tenty underwear out there? OWN IT. BE PROUD OF IT. In fact, go on a Playgirl shoot and show the world your junk. This idle and meaningless outrage is stupid and lame. I would pay real money to anyone who could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that any random other human being isn’t a sexual pervert loaded with monumental loads of kink. All it takes is a shot of whiskey to get a man to drop his shorts and do highly entertaining things with his body.

So what it comes down to? Privacy bent to protect the image that we’d like to impress upon other people that we are all pure as driven snow? How silly is this, when we are as pure as driven-over snow! At least have the fortitude to stand up and say “Yes, that’s my junk shot! Do you like it!?!” Because in that, lies respect and honesty.

To people that feel differently than I do, I have a one word question to ask you:

“Really?”

Brown Chicken, Brown Cow

It eventually had to happen. I read this little nugget in a spam email that was delivered to my inbox just now:

Excuse me ,
I have a question- have you seen this picture of yours in attachment?? Three facebook friends sent it to me today… why did you put it online? wouldn’t it harm your job? what if parents see it? you must be way cooler than I thought about you man :))))

The attachment is IMG9821.zip. Come on. A zip file? Seriously?

Just a note to everyone who might come across this blog post. When you get files in your email that you aren’t expecting, don’t willy-nilly go clicking on them. Even if you have a Mac you could be duped into running a Trojan Horse, which would be very bad. This is likely a Windows virus trying to spread via social manipulation.

Anyhow, if there are compromising photos of you on the net, own them. Be proud of them. There is very little you can do to combat something like that so you might as well make the best of the situation.

Brown Chicken, Brown Cow. 🙂

Abandoning Google Plus

Yesterday I opened my Google Plus page and discovered to my surprise and initial pleasure that Google had brought a new interface to their social network system. As I started to explore this new interface I started to immediately notice that things had changed not for the better, but rather for the worse. Google had unilaterally included their chat system on the right side of my browser window, it’s something I rarely ever use so that system is all wasted space. I noticed that the stories in my circles, the things I really care about are now shuffled off to the left in a column that lost 10% of space on the leftmost and 50% on the rightmost, being moved over for some controls at the very top of the page that now occupy this dreaded whitespace region on my Google Plus page.

It’s this whitespace, and the meaningless chat talker system that I can’t stand. Facebook attempted a similar move by presenting me with a chat-talker screen on the left side as well months ago, when I still used Facebook. When they made the changes to their interface, along with privacy concerns and workplace issues with social networking I left Facebook. Now it just languishes as an identity marker, if content gets on my Facebook page it’s wholly accidental. Twitter’s web page also underwent this columnar approach, as they reconfigured the entire interface out from underneath their users. For Twitter, I stopped using that because it was more noisy than useful, the people I wanted to engage with were just human billboards, and the interface changes were really the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So what is there to do? Complaints about the interface changes are really the only channel you have to express how much you dislike when a service does this to you – but you have no real power. Just complaining is one easily ignored tiny little voice in the darkness and doesn’t amount to anything at all. The only real power that any single user has is the power of choice. In the end, the only choice I have to make is, do I want to still use the system? It’s actually a matter of abandonment. I abandoned Facebook. I abandoned Twitter. Because they changed the interface and made it less useful to me, I am facing the idea of abandoning Google Plus. I don’t need these social network systems to give my life meaning. They need me, or rather, they need aggregate me’s, lots of people, to give what they do meaning. The less people use a socially networked system the less appealing that system is to everyone else. Facebook is only compelling because everyone uses it. There is no real value inherent in Facebook itself. This is a lesson that the classic business models these companies use can’t take into account – that their popularity defines their success. If they make a grossly unpopular change to the interface, then people will flee and their success will go tits up.

I don’t care to encourage other people to abandon these systems if they like them. Each of us has to make these kinds of decisions on a wholly personal level. I find it obnoxious that Google, and Facebook, and Twitter for that matter all force interface changes on users without giving the user any control whatsoever. It would be more elegant if there were a batch of controls we could select from and build our own interface. Put the bits and pieces where we want, opt out of things we don’t care for and make the interface work best for us, as the users. None of these sites have done that, they all behave as if they have global fiat to make changes willy-nilly. The end user who has to contend with these changes can’t do anything really except make that singular choice surrounding the issue of abandonment.

So where do I go now? It’s comic, but in many ways I am looking forward to going backwards. There is one system that I’ve used, mostly as a category but the people behind what I currently use I regard as being the platonic form of that category, and that is WordPress. Going back to blogging. What does the WordPress infrastructure have that attracts me? It’s got stable themes, the site looks very much like it always has. There are changes, but they aren’t as gross in scope as these other systems have perpetrated. I can share links on WordPress, I can write long posts, short status updates, and WordPress has a competent comment system already in place.

So I will give Google Plus until May 1st to do something better with their interface, to recognize the value in the stream and give us users the choice of what systems we want to see on our Google Plus page. Google should give us the ability to turn off the whitespace region, we should be able to turn off the chat talker region, so that we can maximize the stream region. If they fail to correct these glaring human interface deficits I will do to Google Plus what I did to Facebook. I will abandon Google Plus. I will keep the account running but I will no longer actively use it. Things that end up on Google Plus will end up being the same sort of things that end up washing up on Twitter, specifically links to content on my WordPress blog. Google’s loss will be WordPress’ gain. WordPress has always done right by me, and I respect them. I do not respect Twitter, nor do I respect Facebook. My respect for Google is quixotic at best. I used to believe in their “Do No Evil” company mantra, but that has been shed as Google has done some very evil acts, they aren’t what they once were and this sullying of their image makes the pending abandonment easy.

Will my abandonment hurt Google? No, of course not. I’m not so full of myself as to think that me leaving will change anything about the service, that Google will even notice my absence. However if I can inspire other people to give another look at WordPress, maybe see that progress forward can be achieved by regressing to earlier systems may be a worthy pursuit if what you get in the trade is interface stability. That this single raindrop encourages others to fall. The raindrop doesn’t believe it is responsible for the flood. I can only hope that I help the flood along. These massive changes that these social network sites perpetrate on their usership should be punished! We want it all, we want to use the service and we want to control it as well. We want the interface to be regular, logical, useful and static. When we want to make a change, we want to be the ones making it. We do not want to be victims of someones good intentions, Google! I would say this for Facebook as well, but that’s a lost cause.

So time is ticking away. If Google does not act, then the stream on that service is terminal. If that comes to pass, I will be migrating to my WordPress blog.

I hope to see some of you there.

It's silly, and you should stop doing it.

Email confidentiality footers annoy me. I see them frequently on many emails that I get and I think of them as meaningless text that really should be ignored. That an email is somehow a private exchange of information is laughable. Email is sent in plaintext using an open protocol and on the wire it’s all unencrypted.

What really brings this to the forefront is when I see these meaningless bits of mental flotsam and jetsam clogging up my email box because someone set a vacation autoresponse and their membership on a email list is causing them to constantly reply with a “I’ll be out from…” email with this stupid block of text at the bottom asserting that the email is the property of blah blah blah.

Writing email has the same security protections as writing a postcard and tying it to a bird and letting it fly off. Your assertion that your communications are somehow proprietary or classified is utterly hilarious.

If people really wanted to make this not so utterly irrelevant, they should use public-key encryption or at least something like ROT–13 encryption so that the text isn’t readily apparent and takes some work to decode. Sending plaintext with this silly block at the bottom just musses up the display and doesn’t mean anything to anybody. So stop it.

Cloven Hoofywoofies

Just finished the “2012 Great Colleges To Work For” survey sent from ModernThink, LLC. We received a message a while ago indicating that this was an important survey, and that it was important to certain people that we all fill it out.

When I got that email the first thing that came to mind was “Are you sure?”. So this morning I got the invitation to fill out the survey. I clicked my merry way through the questions and near the end there were two open-ended text-box questions. I wrote what I thought down, trying not to be terribly unfair or particularly abusive and came up with a rather compelling bit of text to include as a response for the survey. Then right before I clicked Next I thought I better re-read the invitation email, see if there was any fine print. The devil is in the details, are there any cloven-hoofywoofies behind ModernThink’s draperies?

This text immediately popped out at me:

"Please note, however, that your institution may have the opportunity to purchase a report that summarizes all employee responses to the two optional, open-ended questions at the end of the survey. The report will list all responses to those two questions in alphabetical order by the first letter of the response to ensure objectivity in reporting. In order to preserve your anonymity, please do not include your name or other identifying remarks in your responses."

Anyone who even has a passing knowledge of me can spot my writing style and my passionate bluntness right off the bat, so anything that I write really has my mental fingerprints all over it. In a way, anything that I had written in those optional boxes would have been an “identifying remark” so I highlighted the passages I spent about five minutes each writing and blanked them out. I did consider, just briefly putting in a Lorem Ipsum block, but I didn’t. I’ve learned the lesson from Facebook. It’s a lot like Fight Club, in so far that the chief rule about Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. I just extended that to the survey. It’s far better for me professionally to deflect questions, change the subject, and… oh! isn’t this a pretty flower! 🙂

In a rather tongue-in-cheek way, a white anglo-saxon protestant knows how to ford those kinds of rapids. 🙂

I’m glad I read the fine print. I’m glad I spotted the hoofywoofies. I finished the survey and I can move on with my life.

P.S. I have to give props to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for the term “hoofywoofies”, it’s from their collaborative fiction book titled “Good Omens”. If you get a chance to read it, I highly recommend it.