Friday 2 March 2018

Silly Old Stupid


Leaves from Mr. Hatt's Marvellous Miscellany

I have done quite a few stupid things in my life – at least three times I have come within a whisker of killing myself, including nearly walking off a cliff in Majorca in a sun-induced daze – but I think it's the stupid things I've said that really make me cringe. There have been rather more of those, too, and for some reason they tended to occur at work.

One gem of embarrassment that I recall quite frequently occurred while I was giving some induction training to a new recruit. She had never heard of the 80:20 rule, perhaps the most useful analytical rule of thumb I know. You know the sort of thing: 80% of the wealth is owned by 20% of the population, 80% of library loans are generated by 20% of the stock, and so on. It's not so much a rule of thumb as a profound insight into the workings of society, the universe, and everything.

Anyway, this keenly attentive young lady was duly impressed. Which is always a trap for the susceptible middle-aged man; I should have sensed the danger. But, like a true fool, I began to improvise upon this idea of proportions. Yes, I said, it's interesting, how certain proportions keep coming up when you analyse stuff. There's 50:50, of course, and 60:40. As well as 80:20 I quite often see 70:30, and occasionally 90:10... At which point, I realised I had covered the entire range of possibilities without adding anything by way of insight and hurried on to the next topic.

Then there was the period when, raising small children, I had trained myself not to swear by substituting nursery equivalents, using gritted-teeth endearments in extremis like "sweetheart" and "darling" (as in, "Put my silly old camera down, sweetheart, before you break it!"). I found this started to bleed over into my work life, however, which could get acutely embarrassing when, squashing annoyance, I began to sound like some theatrical luvvie: "You've entered the wrong code again, my darling! That's why your silly old terminal has frozen!" What a relief it was when my kids started to swear like troopers themselves, and I could finally uncork. Fucking hell! Although, it has to be said, this was not so much of a relief for my staff.

Sometimes, though, it can seem as if "stupid" and "embarrassing" have been brought explosively together by some internal, malevolent imp that lives, like a comedian of genius, one beat ahead of the action. Once, in front of a visiting class of 12-year-old schoolchildren, I carefully spelled out "DICK,HARD" on a computer screen, proudly showing off how our new library system could find any book, just by entering the first four letters of the title and the author's name. I have no idea what made me choose Hard Times by Charles Dickens on the spur of the moment. I hadn't even read the damn thing; still haven't. But, what? What's so funny?? Ah!  Ff... Heh... Silly old me!

10 comments:

Paul Mc Cann said...

When very young I had been warching some salty tongued hockey players in a field behind our house. When I got back my mother challenged me with 'What have you done to your new sandals, all dirty.
Oh f**k
Bang
Why the f**k are you smacking me ?
Slap
For f***s sake stop
Another slap
and then the penny dropped.
Incidentally they were Clarks sandals. Remember them ?

Anonymous said...

This makes me think of one of the most embarrassing events during my career as a software engineer. At my first employer, I was part of a team which was tasked with the implementation of an application server and a database. In the main() function of the application server, we had a code block to handle exceptional conditions. In C++, this is done by "catching" exception objects - the type of the object informs about the exception type, e.g. "out of memory" but also a lot of other conditions. In case of an unforeseen error type, the language allows for a default handling. In our case, this was implemented by printing "Dumm gelaufen" ("That's gone stupid" or "Shit happens" in English) to stderr and then aborting the program.

In hindsight, this was not our best idea (or in fact it was, since it was our only idea; it just wasn't a good idea). Anyway, during 18 months of development, this exception never occurred. It did occur, however, when a colleague and I demonstrated the system to the customer for the first time. This was one of the moments where you hope for a hole in the ground to open (in vain of course).

Best, Thomas

Mike C. said...

Paul,

In many ways, it's a shame swearing has become so much less transgressive. Where the fuck can you go, linguistically?

Remember them? I still wear them! Though not in this weather...

Mike

Mike C. said...

Thomas,

I have a similar "oops" tale to tell, from prototyping some Perl CGI scripts for use by my colleagues, though that one is a "two pints" story that I won't be telling here...

Mike

Anonymous said...

BTW, for all F-word afficionados out there: Here's something you might enjoy.

Best, Thomas

Mike C. said...

Thomas,

Doesn't lose much, does it?

There's a classic scene in The Wire, when two detectives actually do examine a crime scene using no other words than "fuck".

My favorite example of the word's sheer flexibility is the sentence, "Fuck it! the fucking fucker's fucking fucked!", which is completely meaningful, especially in car maintenance.

Mike

amolitor said...

In sailing, there are many ropes which pull things up, down, in, out, etc. They have picturesque babes like "halyard" and "Cunningham" and "Vang" and so on.

Except in Australia, where they are open called "upfucker" "downfucker" "infucker" and so forth.

Mike C. said...

Ah, those picturesque babes on boats... I always had a thing for Miss Vang, myself. I assume you're a touch-typist?

Mike

amolitor said...

My favorite babe is named "Autocorrect" but she's terribly cruel.

Mike C. said...

In which case, you had a narrow escape with "cunningham", I reckon.

Mike