You’re trying to do Something. It doesn’t matter what.

You do what you think you’re supposed to do, but Something just isn’t happening.

What you’d think people would do: Look left, look right, look up, locate the brightly colored sign telling you exactly how to do Something. Follow the directions as written. Do your Something, forget all your troubles, c’mon, get happy.

What people actually do: Keep trying the thing that’s not working. Panic. Jab buttons at random. Panic some more. Start wandering around, cursing the idiots who set up this Something station, until you find someone who looks like they might work there. Yell, whine, or mumble about your Something problem. Interject–lots of times–with an explanation of what you’ve been doing and how it’s not working, pretty much forcing them to start over from the beginning because they can’t come out and say, “you’re doing it wrong.” Half-way listen as they tell you the exact same information that was on a sign not six goddamn inches from where you were trying to do Something. Go back to the Something station, try implementing the half of the verbal instructions that you were paying attention to while interleaving your assumptions about the way Something should work, dammit. Fail. Track down the Something attendant again. Continue the cycle until the attendant follows you back to the station and does Something for you. Wonder aloud why they’re making your life so difficult. No matter what else you do, never ever ever ever even notice that there are clear, informative, easy-to-read directions right at your elbow.

Those of you who’ve never worked with the public might think I’m slightly exaggerating. Nope.

(There’s also the transitional lifeform that actually will read the directions and genuinely seem to believe they’re following them, but somehow they manage to consistently read the directions as saying “insert tab A into slot B” when what they actually say is “turn dial 2 to Clowny Face”. These people fascinate and frighten me.)

(Is there, by the way, a non-condescending way to say, “No, sorry, Dial 2 is not the switch labeled alpha, it’s the dial labeled 2. No, that’s a dial but it’s labeled three. We call it Dial 3.”)

(I have no idea where to put the question mark in that last parenthetical aside.)

(I think I may’ve done this before, but what the hell.)

From the Jabootu recap of Gor:

The worst part of the costuming (although one the ladies may like, either directly or just as payback) is that the men also are basically wearing only butt-length tunics. As such, we will be regularly afforded looks at the asses of Cabot and the other menfolk. Yes, they’re wearing ‘leather’ underpants, but these are a bit too teeny for my taste.

What’s up with that? It’s a commonly encountered sentiment, a staple of banal comedies, but I just don’t get it. It’s not like when I see a topless woman I go, “Ewww, tits, yuck!” It’s just, y’know, there. So what’s up with straight men acting like their eyes have been violated when they see more manflesh than is strictly necessary?

Just saw a post at Angry Black Bitch that…well, words fail.

Seems that in honor of Black History Month, the fraternities (or a fraternity? it’s unclear) at UC San Diego decided to hold a party. Here’s the invitation they (no, really) sent out:

February marks a very important month in American society. No, i’m not referring to Valentines day or Presidents day. I’m talking about Black History month. As a time to celebrate and in hopes of showing respect, the Regents community cordially invites you to its very first Compton Cookout.
For guys: I expect all males to be rockin Jersey’s, stuntin’ up in ya White T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU, Ecko, Rockawear, High/low top Jordans or Dunks, Chains, Jorts, stunner shades, 59 50 hats, Tats, etc.
For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes - they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red.
They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as “constipulated”, or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as “hmmg!”, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises,grunts, and faces.
The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these “respectable” qualities throughout the day.
Several of the regents condos will be teaming up to house this monstrosity, so travel house to house and experience the various elements of life in the ghetto.
We will be serving 40’s, Kegs of Natty, dat Purple Drank- which consists of sugar, water, and the color purple , chicken, coolade, and of course Watermelon. So come one and come all, make ya self before we break ya self, keep strapped, get yo shine on, and join us for a day party to be remembered- or not.

I’m sure these are the exact same people who think it’s ridiculous that we still need (or ever needed?) things like Black History Month, Black Student Unions, and the NAACP. Bleargh.

I know I should stop reading them, because I always end up either grumpy or outright raging at something, but I religiously read each week’s new Post Secrets. As you know, Bob, during the week the proprietor of the site puts up some of the comments he’s received in response to that week’s secrets.

Here’s a comment from this week’s batch:

At my college we have a bulletin board inspired by PostSecret. One day a photograph of a sunset was posted. Written across the photo in white ink it said “sometimes I wonder if anyone would care if I didn’t wake up in the morning”.

A few weeks later another photograph was posted. This was a photo of a sunrise. In white ink it said “yes, I would”. . . I wish I could tell the person “thank-you” because the sunset was mine.

OK, here’s how I read that:

Stranger A anonymously says “Would anyone miss me when I’m gone?”

Stranger B sees A’s anonymous message and says “I’d miss you, even though I have no idea who you are.”

Stranger A sees B’s response and says “Whew!”

Seriously, how does that work? How could B be so arrogant as to believe that sie’s so veddy, veddy sensitive that the unknown death of a complete stranger would somehow affect hir? Even worse, how could A take comfort in something so transparently meaningless? It’s almost as if both of these parties are more interested in symbols than in substance.

Am I wrong in thinking this is weird and maybe even a little distressing?

I still remember a cartoon the Lampoon published once; it was like a stick of dynamite in my head. It’s one of those things that seems preciously obvious now, even banal, but for every one of us even the most time-worn ideas were sparkling new at one time.

I have no idea who the artist was, other than that her name suggested she was Latina. There’s no way I could dig up a possibly existent copy on the web, so I’ll do my best to describe it. The body of the strip was a large number of small panels, maybe three rows of four or six. Each panel had the same basic setup: there was a small banner at the top, a close-up drawing of the same character’s face and sometimes a small speech balloon in each one. Each banner simply identified a person (mother, priest, boyfriend). The title was something like “How They See Rosie”, and the character was drawn significantly differently, but still roughly recognizable, in each panel.

Like I said, it’s an obvious point: People see us differently, and we present ourselves differently to them, based on the nature of our relationships. It’s the kind of thing that can seem totally revolutionary and right-on to a 16-year-old, though.

And it’s apparently a lesson not learned by the people at Google, as evidenced by the clusterfuck of Buzz.

An email address, I think for most people, serves as a virtual stand-in for the body.[1] It’s more basic than something than an avatar; like the body, it’s the substrate on which avatars can be built. Like the body, we can (and, I think, do) use the same email address to put forward multiple selves to multiple others. We code-switch and choose appropriate topics of discourse effortlessly, thoughtlessly, depending on the correspondent.

A social networking account demands coherence, not the nebulosity of a complete person. This can be mitigated by friending only people who would recognize and accept a circumscribed set of your personae, but still all of your utterances must fall within the area of commonality of all of your contacts.[2] (That users are not able to consistently draw the Venn diagrams before speaking allows for the success of sites like failbooking.)

Google stupidly Did Evil by launching Buzz as opt-out and by auto-subscribing all of the people in a user’s contact list. They set up a situation in which a user could easily, innocently make utterances that would be read by mother, boss, coworker, fuckbuddy, and pal; it is unlikely that there is any intersection that would satisfy the requirements of all listeners, and it is highly likely that simple utterances could unintentionally alienate valued correspondents.

There may be more to come, but I’ll need to set up a few things first. So there probably won’t be more to come after all.

[1] Of course, I’m certain I’m not alone in maintaining multiple accounts for multiple classes of correspondents. There’s the email address that’s used almost solely for resumes, there’s the one I keep for setting up accounts, and there’s the one I use for social purposes. Even doing that, though, there’s inevitably some bleed-through.

[2] This is one of the two big reasons I just don’t care about social networking, why I may remember to log into Facebook once or twice a month and never post any status updates there. It’s not so much that I resent flattening my Whitmanesque vast multitudes into a single, inoffensive yawp; it’s more that it just seems like too much work to write anything that will be both of interest and not off-putting to all of the people I’ve friended.

A: No, it is mathematically impossible. Locke-centric episodes of Lost are the limit toward which the curve of TV-quality goes asymptotic. Of course, this means that Locke-centric episodes of Lost cannot be as good as themselves; this seeming paradox is resolved by the fact that these episodes are just that fucking awesome.

There’s a post up at Sadly, No! about wingnut opposition to replacing “don’t ask, don’t tell” with “who gives a fuck?”. I very rarely comment at high-traffic blogs, but this time the spirit moved me:

…your son or daughter may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals who may very well view them with sexual interest.

I think the thing that pisses me off the most about this is that they get the verb tense all wrong.

In the three years I’ve lived within driving distance of an Army base I’ve managed to make teh buttsecks with at least five active-duty soldiers, two of them on post. Every one of them had served at least once in Iraq, and a couple were waiting for a trip back. I’m neither an attractive nor a particularly young man, so I reckon that if I was able to score five then there must be a whole lot more with higher standards.

The military is already chock full o’ gays, bisexuals, and bi-curiouses, so they’re already sharing showers. Removing the demonstrably useless ban will do nothing but end a lot of unnecessary discharges. (And there’s a straight line for you.)

And now I’m following up here with a tale of that rarest of things, a genuinely moving random encounter.

Last year, I think in the late spring, I got a Craigslist response from a soldier freshly back from the desert. He drove down very late one weekend night, said he’d never done anything with a dude before but wanted to try getting head. I was game, and he was frankly hot.

He was nervous, and he couldn’t, y’know, finish. No worries, happens from time to time. What was unusual was that he didn’t want to zip up and leave. Asked if I smoked, asked if I minded him having a cigarette before he left. He settled onto the couch, and we started chatting.

Once he got going, he didn’t stop for a few hours. This was a man who had been brutalized by war, who had experienced things I don’t want to try to imagine. He was clearly psychically wounded, but he wasn’t broken, and what I think he really wanted wasn’t just fleshly release or physical closeness but somebody he could open up to.

I listened the best I could, put on the best neutral face I could manage when he said things that were horrifying or objectionable, and just let him spill. I don’t know how much good it did him in the long run, but I know that when he left he looked like he’d gotten the relief he needed.

I can’t be the last person to’ve heard about this. I picked it up from a great post on Making Light.

Seems some site I don’t care about with a focus on social media (which I don’t care about) put up a post about Facebook and AOL Messenger and user lock-in, which would be two things I don’t care about and one thing I do care about in contexts other than this one.

Anyway. This post was titled Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login”. Even though I don’t care about this site, many highly-juiced people do; this led to the post becoming a top-ranked Google result for searches on “facebook login”.

You can see where this is going.

We all know that lots of less-savvy people use search engines to navigate their way to favorite sites instead of typing the URLs in their address bars or bookmarking these sites. We know this, but the scale of the practice hadn’t sunk in with me until I saw the comment thread following the “One True Login” post. Hundreds and hundreds of people showed up thinking they were somewhere they weren’t, confused and angry, wondering why Facebook had changed its login page, wondering why they couldn’t log in.

Now, I’ll cop to this: If I hadn’t been introduced to the 1000-browser pileup through the Making Light post, I would probably just be sitting here chortling at the lusers. I’m glad I got to it the way I did.

The immediate takeaway is that people will use your services however they are able to use them, best practices and your intentions be damned. You can mock them, berate them, bemoan their inability to follow clear procedures, whatever. If their misuse of your services causes them to give up in frustration and turn to your competitors, then your problem is bigger than theirs.

More interesting, though, are the questions raised. Why do people navigate this way? Even if they manage to get a search engine set as their homepage, with any reasonably recent browser it’s a helluva lot quicker and easier just to start typing the name of the site and then choose from the dropdown options. (Chrome even autopopulates the bar with the top pick, but I doubt many of these people use Chrome.) I can see how bookmarking might not be intuitive to some people, and how there could be a learning curve involved. I cannot see how typing a site’s name into a search engine is easier or more intuitive than using the address bar. But yet.

(And, of course, I exaggerate, because I can see how it would be easier. Tell me, do you pay attention to all the information in the nameplate of a (print) newspaper you’re reading, or do you focus near-exclusively on the headlines and stories?)

The even bigger question is what Abi Sutherland gets at in the Making Light piece: How could these people not have immediately realized they weren’t at any sort of Facebook login at all? Pretend that the concept “well, they’re stupid” doesn’t exist for a minute and try to come up with an answer. If you can’t do that, instead try to delineate exactly what this sort of stupidity entails. I don’t have any answers, but I think it’s a valuable question.

I’ve gone through four or five analogies while working on this, but it’s probably best to go straight-up.

Briefly: When, if ever, is it desirable to do a job that’s better than good enough?

Before you answer, I need to be clear about “good enough”; “good enough” has gotten a bad rap, I think, because it is often used to describe things that are not in fact good enough.

When I say “good enough”, I mean exactly what the phrase denotes and little of what it connotes. That which is good enough

• fulfills the purposes for which it is intended;
• would not, if improved, create additional, meaningful returns;
• will not harm the creator’s reputation among people whose opinion the creator values;
• would not, if improved, increase the creator’s sense of value in a job well done.

Does it look like I’ve stacked the deck? I’m afraid it looks like I’ve stacked the deck. Let me shuffle it up with a less-than-salubrious example:

Let’s say you’re finishing up your final paper for your final undergraduate English class. You’ve proofed and rewritten until you’re perfectly satisfied with the text. You know from all the other papers in the class that the instructor is a creampuff grader, that your average work exceeds his standards for a high A. You could score a D on this and still get an A for the course, but you’ve polished up to A+ standards purely for your own personal sense of accomplishment.

There’s a problem, though: one of the references in your works cited page is really screwy. You dug it up deep in a database somewhere, but the citation information is incomplete and it’s a material type you’ve never worked with before. You could spend 20-30 minutes trying to scrounge for the missing information and another 15 minutes trying to figure out how to properly cite, I dunno, a limerick used in the editor’s preface to a conference proceedings. Or you could accept the letter-grade reduction for an incomplete works cited page, get a B on the paper, and still walk away with the exact same A for the course.

Ten years ago, this would’ve been a no-brainer for me: I would have hit the books, trying to make right something I knew was wrong. I would have poked and prodded until I found the missing information, and I would’ve done this not because I would be more satisfied with the end product but because it would have been unthinkable to turn in something I knew could have been made better.

Today, it’s also a no-brainer: I would print out the paper complete with broken citation, staple it, and get a good night’s sleep. I wouldn’t give a second thought to the grader’s disappointment in my cavalier approach to citations, because I know that the English instructors don’t talk to anyone in my underwater-basketweaving department. I’d happily take my B on the paper, because I’d still get the same A for the class.

So, am I in the wrong here? If so, why? Is it ever desirable to work past the point of diminishing returns and into the field of no additional returns? If so, when?

I got the bill for my car insurance today and found out that my rates have gone up by $120. This is off-set by my new, better good-driver discount, but still there’s a net $80 increase. Sheesh. My premiums have gone up by almost 25%, and the only reason I can think of is that I was late with a credit card payment in November.