Interpreting jokes in real time is murderously difficult. Here’s a classic Japan story and then one from me:
Patrick McKenzie
69.7K posts
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.
- A contractor said something during this project which I thought was both compassionate and the sign that he was a skilled professional, and I thought I’d share: Scene: My mother, who has some mobility challenges, is sketching out what she wants in her kitchen. He listens.
- "So great to know my code has been accepted into your codebase. I charge very reasonable rates for IP assignment. You'll receive an invoice shortly.""after 11 technical interviews" "your work has been accepted into our codebase" interviews are getting out of hand
- Replying to @patio11Him: Because no woman should see her kitchen destroyed like that. She’d have enough to worry about. So we suggest we put the cabinet just a little farther away, in the dining room. And if she ever comes back in a wheelchair, it is to her own house, the way it always was.
- I miss Japan. Anyhow, as someone who was a professional translator for a few years, if I had written this card it would have been among the best work of my career. It is a work of art two sentences in length.cried thinking about this last night
- This sounds like a trivial observation and it isn’t: No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win.
- Friendly neighborhood Dangerous Professional advice: If you are ever at a meeting taking notes, and someone at the meeting expresses umbrage that notes are being taken of the meeting, and this is routine notetaking for this genre of meeting, …
- Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before. In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.
- (n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)Signatures are a weird, outdated, and frankly laughable way to prove somebody approved a document.
- Apparently Japan Post is debuting the most obvious improvement in addressing for last two decades: address virtualization. You sign up with them and get a short alphanumeric code. Their DB holds a pointer to physical address. If you move, you tell them, pointer changes.
- Replying to @patio11Him: And I put the cabinet she wants there. And you try to move a wheelchair between them. That ain’t gonna fit. And that blocks her from getting from her own kitchen to her own living room. Me: Got it. Him: And I don’t want to come back here on an unhappy day and charge her.
- It occurs to me that my hobby in writing letters about the Fair Credit Reporting Act is suddenly topical! So some quick opinionated advice:
- In honor of someone’s bad bug today, I will retell a story of my worst bug: Once upon a time I was the CEO and entire engineering team of a company which sent appointment reminders. Each reminder was sent by a cron job draining a queue. That queue was filled by another cron job
- Replying to @patio11Him: Your mother isn’t going to be using this kitchen for one week or one month. Maybe at some point in future she comes back to it, and it’s in a wheelchair. That will not be a happy day. Me: Oh. Him: Now I want you to look at this angle here. If I put an island here.
