Language is meaningless

The title of this essay isn’t totally accurate. But it reflects how I feel at the moment, and I figured a title like that might be attention-grabbing. A more accurate title would be “Language is arbitrary” or “Language is circular.” Those statements aren’t news to English majors, readers of Saussure, or thoughtful people in general. We all know language is largely just built on itself. But the truth of this was brought home to me last night in especially vivid light.

I was tutoring my Mexican lady, and as usual we were going over vocabulary questions she had from the reading she had done since our last meeting. She speaks English pretty competently, and according to a test she took with the literacy council, she reads it at an eighth-grade level (whatever that means). Last night, though, her questions were baffling me.

Take the previous sentence. “Though” was one of her questions. She had come across it in her reading, and she tried to look it up herself. The dictionary told her it was both a conjunction and an adverb. I had never known that. I often pull out the dictionary when tutoring. It can be helpful for articulating definitions of words we use so often that we never think about them. Not so in this case:

though, conj. in spite of the fact that.

Well, okay, that’s a pretty good definition, but what about “in spite of?” What does that mean, when you really think about it? I flipped back 51 pages to see what I might find under “spite.” For a second, it looked like the dictionary was going to do me a double favor by defining the whole expression:

—Idiom. in spite of, notwithstanding; despite.

Jesus. How the hell are you going to explain “notwithstanding” to an ESL student? It’s not quite the same as teaching a word like “chair,” where you get to just point at the fucking thing. 

I realized that a dictionary isn’t useful until you finally land on a definition consisting entirely of words the reader knows. If you were especially unlucky, your student might ask about some Word of Infinite Regress that would have you flipping back and forth through the dictionary for the rest of your life.

I can’t recall exactly how I ended up explaining “though.” I think it involved a fair amount of weird gesturing. And examples, those always help. If you give enough context, people can pretty well intuit the meaning of a word even without a comprehensible definition. I think my explanation came through, more or less, but it was completely exhausting. I kept foundering on overly complicated details, self-consciously realizing that the only thing I could offer was more and more words. I wanted there to be some kind of Look I could give her that would telepathically impart my knowledge. 

Once we finally dispensed with “though,” we moved on to other questions. “Struggle” came up, in the context of people “struggling with alcohol.” Thinking I might have better luck, I turned once again to the dictionary:

struggle, v. to contend vigorously, as with an adversary or problem.

Yeesh. The dictionary makes me cry.

Errors and retractions

I think I have to take back some of what I said in my previous post. I had a dream last night where I was solving some kind of three-dimensional puzzle, and there were a lot of visual elements that I could describe in intricate detail. My sense of sight really was engaged.

Maybe instead of writing an entire essay on the nature of the senses in dreams, I should have just said "Man, dreams are fucked up."

That would have left a lot less room for contradiction.

Do you dream in smell?

Last night I had a dream where I ran into an old friend from high school. Actually, rather than calling him a “friend,” it would be more accurate to call him a “drug-dealing acquaintance.” It was in a restaurant kitchen. He was waiting tables and bringing back a load of dishes. I don’t know what I was doing there. 

He stopped, and we said “hey,” in the surprised way you say it to someone you haven’t seen in years. After only a couple seconds of pleasantries, he excitedly offered me some cocaine (man, he hadn’t changed a bit!). I hesitated, so he grabbed a bag of it out of his breast pocket and offered to let me smell it. In my dream world, evidently, smell is an adequate test of the quality of coke.

So I took a whiff, which inadvertently became a half-snort. It smelled exactly—exactly—the way I remember cocaine smelling: mediciney, with a touch of sweet spiciness to it. What’s weird about it is that I haven’t smelled that smell in almost seven years. But in my dream it was perfect.

I think it’s the first time I’ve smelled anything in a dream. I can’t say for sure I’ve never had a dream that wasn’t somehow informed by smell—like, “Hey, I smell smoke, so maybe I should try to find where the fire is!”—but I’m pretty sure this is the only one I’ve had where a smell took center stage. This whiff of cocaine was so striking and true to life that—obviously—I was thinking about it long after dream’s end. In fact, it even took me a while to realize that the sensation was only imagined. I woke up thinking about the smell of cocaine, and it was only after I got out of the early morning quasi-reality that I remembered I hadn’t actually snorted cocaine since I was 18. 

This got me thinking about which of our senses are present in dreams, and to what extent. I think most people would say their entire sensory selves are present in their dreams. I don’t think this is true, even though I’m only extrapolating from my own experience.

How many dreams have you had where you smelled something distinct? How many dreams have you had where you touched something and really noticed its texture? Or what about the more complicated parts of sight: patterns, optical illusions, light sources and shadows? How often are you aware of those things in your dreams? 

It’s common in conversations about dreaming to ask people if they dream in color or in black and white. I’ve always thought this was sort of a bogus question, derived from a mistaken analogizing of dreams and movies (If you asked someone from the pre-film era if he dreamed in black and white, he’d probably ask where you came up with such an absurd question.). Still, the question illustrates our basic uncertainty concerning what we actually sense in our dreams.

I think people ask the question in the first place because they’re unsure of their own answers. They want other people to help them decide. I’ve never really believed the people who claim to dream in black and white. It seem ridiculous that anyone’s dreams would conform to a convention of cinematography that existed for only 50 years. But I don’t doubt that these people see no color in their dreams. I think the explanation may be that they don’t really see anything at all. 

In some of my experiences with psychedelics, I felt that I wasn’t “seeing” the kaleidoscopic patterns unfolding behind my closed eyelids, but rather that I was just imagining them so intensely that it was pretty much the same thing as seeing them. I think something similar is going on in dreams. 

Everything we “sense” in dreams is, of course, just a product of imagination, and it’s only through our unconscious laziness that we convince ourselves that the sensory parts of our brains are actually being engaged. Only in rare, rare instances (for me, at least) are the senses involved in any way I can point to. It takes something as odd as a forgotten acquaintance pulling out some high-quality blow for my imagination to reach all the way to my olfactory nerves. 
________________________________________________________________________


P.S. This essay doesn't really contradict my lucid dream one, because that lucid dream was a total anomaly.

The great mental build-up to nothing

Last week at work was one of the most stressful I’ve had in a long time. It was partly because I had just gotten back from ten days out of the office and had an enormous pile of emails to sort through (this being by far my busiest time of the year), but it was mostly because of a dispute I had with one of the volunteer conference chairs I work with.

The details of the dispute aren’t important. He wanted to do something unusual in his upcoming conference, I told him he couldn’t (for various legitimate reasons), he persisted, I told him “no” again, he went behind my back to complain to the event manager (because he’s a bit of a prick), many emails and phone calls flew back and forth.

The stressful part about it was that I wasn’t sure if the event manager would back me up. Some of the other event managers I work with I would trust to support me fully and tell the chair to fuck himself. But this one I wasn’t so sure about. I was just waiting for her to come to my desk and tell me to comply with the chair’s request just to make him happy. 

I was dreading that this might happen. I had already firmly told this guy “no” twice, so it would have been humiliating and undermining of my credibility to then go back to him and say “yes” after all. It would mean saying I was wrong, which—oh—I just hate.

This drama played out over a few days, and I began convincing from the beginning that this humiliation definitely would happen. I was certain that the event manager was going to force me to go back to this dude, hat in hand, apologize for saying “no,” and give him exactly what he wanted. The whole scenario continued to build in severity in my imagination until it became a matter of professional life or death.

I imagined in intricate detail how I was going to flat-out refuse the event manager’s instructions to say “yes” to this guy. I imagined how I was going to tell her everything I dislike about her style of micromanagement and about her meddling in my work which she doesn’t totally understand. I imagined I was going to say, “Fuck it—this is the last straw,” and just walk out of the building without ever looking back. 

I have a small piece of company property stored in my luggage at home since I need to bring it to all the conferences I attend. On Thursday, I brought it in to the office just in case I really did decide to cut all ties with the company right then and there.

Well, if you read the title of this essay you’ve probably already guessed that all this imagination—all this dread, all this planning of arguments, all this pre-emptive fuming on my part—came to nothing.The event manager supported me, we politely shot down the chair, and the week ended on a relaxed high note. Jesus.

What’s funny about it is that I had been telling myself the entire time that it was going to come to nothing. I would have brief moments of sanity where I said to myself, “No no, man, you always imagine these conflicts are going to play out worse than they actually do.” I must have told myself that no fewer than ten times. It’s the truth. I do always imagine the worst-case scenario in my personal disputes. But only a few minutes after telling myself this, I’d involuntarily slip right back into crafting rebuttals and insults.

So now the stress I put myself through for a few days seems utterly ridiculous. I wish I could say I’ve drawn from this the lesson that I should finally just relax and not daydream every minor disagreement into an argument of world-defining proportions. But the sad fact is that I’ve drawn that lesson before, and I know I always forget it. I think the real lesson I’ve drawn is that human beings are indeed, as others have said, fundamentally creatures of routine—endlessly repeating ourselves in our relationships with others. And even repeating ourselves in how we, when alone, conceive of those relationships. 

Am I always going to imagine myself as the beleaguered voice of reason needing to battle it out with those who just don’t understand? Well, probably. I’m pretty well used to imagining that by now.  

Waste not

I’m going to revisit yet something else from my most recent trip. On my flight out through Seatac (first thing in the morning), I stopped in the food court to have an idiotic sweetened bread product (something I usually wouldn’t do). 

The tables in the food court all had these gigantic circular stickers on them devoted to Seatac’s waste disposal programs. Like so many public institutions in the Northwest, Seatac has jumped fully on the bandwagon of confusing patrons with separate bins for food scraps, mixed paper, plastics, metal, glass, scrap lumber, volatile solvents and oils, burned-out refrigerator compressors, ammunition casings, cigarette butts, and used syringes. Anything not included in those categories is meant to be thrown in a bin vaguely labeled, “Waste.”

The point, anyway is that Seatac is going to great lengths to soothe the guilty consciences of upper-middle-class white consumers, and these circular table stickers were there to help said consumers (and also Seatac) congratulate themselves for their efforts. The circle was divided into thirds: one green, devoted to compostables; one blue, devoted to recyclables; and one gray, devoted to the “other” stuff that gets thrown in a landfill. 

In the green section was this header: “Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Composts!” Fair enough. 

In the blue section: “Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Recycles!” Okay.

And the gray section: “Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Reduces Waste!” Huh.

You’ll notice the last one deviates stylistically from the theme established in numbers one and two. They go from using an intransitive verb in the first two to using a transitive verb and direct object in number three. Composts. Recycles. Reduces Waste. One of these things is not like the others.

In the first two, they are telling you exactly what Seatac does with what is placed in the respective bin. Put a banana peel in the green bin. Seatac composts it. Put a pop can in the blue bin. Seatac recycles it. 

Try that same sentence construction with number three. Put a styrofoam codpiece in the gray bin. Seatac reduces waste it. Doesn’t work.

What I’m getting at is that if Seatac wants to be honest, they need to change that header in the gray section. It ought to read, “Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Wastes!” Because that’s what they do with the stuff in the gray bin. They waste it. 

There’s no “reducing” involved in the gray bin. Seatac as a whole may be producing less landfill-fodder, but the waste reduction happens as a byproduct of what happens in the blue bin and the green bin. When you toss something in the gray bin, you (and Seatac) are not reducing waste. You’re just wasting, and it’s deceitful of the information sticker to imply otherwise.

I’m not trying to cast moral aspersions on Seatac for wasting a lot. I don’t care about that part, since we all waste a lot. What bothers me is just their circumlocution regarding it. They want to self-righteously pat themselves on the back for their recycling and composting, but they have to put a linguistic spin on their landfilling to make it more palatable. 

They’re stuck in a position of not being able to brag about the positive without simultaneously revealing the (much larger) negative. So they cleverly evade the question, and everyone feels a little bit happier knowing their airport is making a difference. 

Of course, I’m probably the only pathetic loser who’s taken the time to actually read that sticker. 

Why things have to do things

I was thinking about something from a flight I took a few days ago. Across the aisle from me was a three- or four-year-old boy with his mom. I sensed that it was the kid’s first flight, or at least the first one he was conscious of. He was really excited to look out the window, and he had a lot of questions about the plane. 

One question stuck out. He kept asking his mom, “Why did it have to do that?” whenever the plane did anything strange. We hit some turbulence at one point. The plane shook and made the usual turbulence noises. “Why did it have to do that?” he asked, with a concerned look on his face. Same deal when we had a slightly rough landing. The plane jarred to a semi-halt and gave everybody a surprise. “Why did it have to do that?”

I realized the kid was still living in the comfortable but illusory world of childhood in which everything happens for a reason. He imagined intent in everything he experienced. I hated to think of him growing older and finding that things just happen. It’s a talk that the parents never give explicitly, but which kids get the gist of eventually: “Sorry, Billy, but the world is outside anyone’s control or purpose, and there’s often no sense to be made of anything.”

It was hard for me to catch what the mother was telling her son. It sounded like she was basically saying, “Well, that’s turbulence from when the air moves around.” But she most definitely was not answering why the plane had to do that. She was ignoring the real thrust of the kid’s question. I could tell the answer wasn’t totally satisfying to him. Part of his entire conception of the world—that nothing would happen unless it was god-damned necessary for the proper functioning of the universe—was left wanting for reinforcement.

It would really be great if all the weird, unpleasant, inexplicable things that happen to us were in fact necessary for the proper functioning of the universe, and if we could somehow get those answers:

“Why did my bank have to become insolvent and lose my entire life savings?”
“Because that’s going to make the Earth rotate today!”

“Why did my girlfriend have to meet a dashing Bosnian male model on her Peace  Corps trip?”
“Because that’s going to give them a nice sunny afternoon in Omaha!”

“Why did I have to get cancer on my eyeball?”
“Because that’s how zebras get their stripes!”

It would be very comforting, wouldn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t be so upset about your house burning down if you knew it had to do that in order for the world to have ice cream. There may be some kind of cosmic order like this. After all, the universe is a closed system that was all contained in one pinprick 12–15 billion years ago. Maybe everything good functions on something bad. So maybe that time you got two flat tires on the interstate was necessary for me to have a really great steak for dinner that night. 

Customer service insanity

So I’m back now from my silly little conference thing in San Jose. It’s good to be back. 

I was doing a different job down there than I normally do at these things. I was checking in all the conference attendees. Every attendee has to have a badge. The badge has their name, their company, and also a barcode that all the sales reps in the exhibit can scan to retrieve their contact information and begin spamming them with marketing emails. Depending on what part of the meeting they’ve signed up for, the attendees also get various handouts: technical programs, exhibit guides, junky tchotchkes branded up and down with sponsor logos. 

The badges and handouts have to be printed and distributed on site, and I was the guy working the station where that all happens. I had help from some locally based temp workers, but I either oversaw or personally handled the preparation of a badge for each and every attendee, of which there were about 2,500. My station was also, by default, an information desk for the entire event. 

It’s the most customer service I’ve ever done or ever hope to do in my entire life. It was a veritable marathon of politeness, attentiveness, consideration, professional empathy, good-natured problem-solving, hospitality, and all the other shit that any sensible person would hate to do for hours on end.  

It’s not so much that the people were unpleasant to help. Overall, the clientele at these events is quite appreciative. What bothered me was simply that they were there. It wasn’t their manner I had a problem with, but their very existence. 

Every one of them wants to talk to you (legitimately enough), and they want you to talk in return. I need my badge. I lost my badge. Can I register here? I lost my program. Where’s the poster session? What time is it? I need a receipt. Why didn’t I get a lunch ticket? I left my underwear in China. Is it going to rain tomorrow? Where’s the nearest Starbucks? 

I don’t mind answering these questions at first, but once I’ve answered each of them a few dozen times, I’m tapped out. In a given day I can handle 115 distinct interactions, tops. That number lowers considerably when we’re talking about politely professional interactions. At some points during this event I was having upwards of 100 politely professional interactions in a single hour. I can make it happen when I need to. But it hurts.

By the end of it I was ready to completely lose it on the most respectful customers. We got our huge rush of registrants on the first two days of the conference, but late-comers continued trickling in for two days afterward. By the third day my movements and verbal responses had become so robotic that I worried a small slip in my wiring would make me go berserk on some poor little Japanese man who had flown all the way from Nikon HQ. The only thing he wanted was his registration packet, but I just wanted to strangle him for making me do and say what I had already done and said about a million and a half times.  

I began scanning the convention hall for people who had that look in their eyes—that look that said they were approaching me with a question I had already heard eight times in as many minutes. They were walking straight toward me, and they were going to make me talk, god damn their filthy hides. When the moment of truth came and I actually opened my mouth to reply, I found my voice catching here and there as I restrained myself from lashing out with irrational and nonsensical verbal abuse.

I’m back home now, though, and thanking god I don’t do that stuff for my regular job. But there are many who do. My few days of customer service torture gave me some insight into the peculiarities you observe in these people. I’ve noticed that flight attendants frequently leave inexplicable pauses in their scripted PA announcements. Example: 

“Attention passengers, portable electronic devices may once again be used at this time, although any device that sends or receives a signal must remain powered off for the duration of the flight. Cabin service will commence shortly, but for now we just ask that you sit back, relax, and . . .

. . .

. . .

. . . enjoy the flight.”

It always perplexed me. She can’t have forgotten what she was going to say—she’s said it a hundred thousand times. Now I realize that it’s precisely because she’s said it a hundred thousand times that she pauses for so long at such a strange moment. The robotic speech just becomes too much for her. She’s momentarily staring into a very deep and very dark abyss. She’s thinking about murdering all the passengers and then blowing her own brains out right after. 

I now have so much more sympathy for the poor girl.  

   

Won't somebody please think of the tea?

Something I neglected to mention in my tea post a while back, but which I suppose was sort of implicit, is that I love tea. Love it love it love it love it love it love it love it. I love it hot or iced (but especially hot), I love it black or green (but especially black), I love it in all climates, in all cultures, under all atmospheric conditions, and at all altitudes. I love it when camping, I love it at work, I love it while traveling.

I love tea at all times of day. It’s a wonderful start to the morning, but it’s also great after meals or in the middle of a lazy and thoughtful afternoon. And later in the evening it’s just lovely to have a cup of the herbal stuff.

Tea is indisputably the king of hot beverages. It’s more refined, more varied, more international, and—goddamnit—just more intellectual than coffee. Drinking tea is like drinking a flower—sometimes literally so.

I’m on this subject because I just arrived in San Jose for another work trip, and traveling in these United States is always just one tea disappointment after another. I really should get in the habit of leaving home without any expectation of having a single decent cup of it while I’m away. The trouble is simply that no one in this country gives any thought to the tea they serve. They’ll tell you all about their organic fair-trade shade-grown artisan-roasted hand-blended blah blah blah horseshit coffee, but when it comes to tea they’ll give you at best a blank stare.

I had to take the 5:00 am flight out of Bellingham this morning (means getting up at 2:45), so by the time I got to Seatac at about 5:30 I was desperate for a piping hot serving of Earl Grey. I stopped by one of the coffee places in the food court. The girl behind the counter grabbed what looked like a decent bag of tea (as far as bagged tea goes), but then she proceeded to fill the cup with hot water first and then dunk the bag into it. Goddamnit, you stupid girl, you just violated the first principle of tea brewing! Always pour the water over the leaves. That’s the only way to get them to stay properly submerged and brew a full-bodied cup. There are countries where you get caned for doing what she did.

 I took what she gave me anyway, because I was desperate, but it was seriously underwhelming. It only resembled tea, really. Brewing it that way is sort of like throwing a steak into a cold pan and turning on the heat afterward. You end up with something, but it’s not nearly what it’s supposed to be.

I knew better than to try ordering tea on my flight to San Jose (Who the hell knows what Alaska Airlines would give you?), so I was looking forward to having a proper cup when I checked into my hotel room (I’ve got a little bit of down time before I start working.). I always get put in Marriotts for my work trips, and I’m accustomed to them having a poor selection of tea. They just have this little envelope thingy with “Twinings: Your Passport to the Finest English Teas” on the front and two bags of tea inside: one Earl Grey and one decaffeinated English Breakfast (the latter of which doesn’t even count).

So as soon as I got into my room an hour and a half ago, I opened up the envelope and found that the Earl Grey had been taken by a previous guest and not replaced by the maid! There was only the undrinkable decaf! Had she not noticed this and thought that someone just might want to have a cup of fucking Early Grey? What a letdown. Meanwhile there are three (!) packets of coffee, to satisfy the rabble. 

So here I am drinking coffee like an ordinary American schlub. It’s better than nothing, I guess, but it makes me long to move to a culture where tea is given the respect and veneration it deserves.

Whither automation?

For the past few days I’ve been working on automating some processes in my job. There are certain things we do in my company that require genuine human judgment. Many, though, do not. 

If it requires human judgment, it probably can’t be automated. Customer service questions, for example, will most likely always need human beings to answer them. Some student from a small college in India coming to your conference wants to have his airfare and hotel paid for. He has to be told “no,” and he has to be told tactfully. Hard to automate that. Making a spreadsheet, though, is the type of thing that can almost always be automated (to some degree, at least). Lots of things we work on are just algorithms. And computers love algorithms. 

If you work in a business (such as basically any business these days) that has processes that are being automated , you’ll find the workers have curious and contradictory attitudes toward automation. If a new automated process eliminates one or two tedious but relatively minor tasks and makes for a bit of breathing room in the workday, workers are pleased. But if it begins to look like everything they do is about to be automated, workers become Luddites. 

I remember a scene in The Wire where Frank Sobotka is shown a video about the new automated unloading processes at the Rotterdam Port. These processes have allowed the Port to reduce its workforce by, like, 97%. This brings Frank almost to tears. All he can see are his Baltimore union buddies who are about to be automated right out of their livelihoods.

I’d guess most people feel this way about their jobs. Even if they don’t really like what they do, they hate and fear the idea of a machine doing it instead. If our jobs were automated to the point that we were no longer needed, we would be forced back into the world to think on our feet once again. Which is a difficult thing to do after being, well, an automaton for years on end.

But the funny (and contradictory) part of it is that people universally love automation in their personal lives. Automatic dishwasher? Hell yes! Automatic vacuum cleaner? Sign me up! An app that automatically sends Happy Birthday e-cards to my friends and family? I can’t believe I ever lived without it! Even purists and artisans like to find tasks automated. Julia Child sings the praises of food processors in the anniversary edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “Mousses in minutes,” she says. 

There’s not a single job around the house I wouldn’t be delighted to see a robot or a computer doing in my place or at least making easier. The reason we all love automation at home is because it’s obvious how it adds value to our lives. It frees up time to do more things we value more.  

It’s only in the twisted world of “employment” that people lose sight of how automation adds value. Many people would describe their financial relationship with their employer by saying, “The company pays me to do x task.” But doing x task is not really what the company pays you for. They pay you to add value to the organization. And if a machine can be made to do x task, then the machine is adding value.

It might seem that the machine is only adding value to the people at the top, but it’s also adding value to the worker it displaces. If you were to see yourself as an entrepreneur within your company, you’d see the automation of your job as a fantastic opportunity to take on greater challenges and show your stuff. After all, if your job could be automated, it must not have been employing all your brilliant talents, right?

Few people see their jobs this way, though, and few would seize the opportunity. Maybe they’re not to blame. Not many companies encourage a very enterprising attitude among their employees. But for those who do think creatively and entrepreneurially, the future of automation holds exciting possibilities. There’s no telling how many jobs will be fully (or almost fully) automated in 30 years. Lots of jobs will be destroyed. Lots will be created. Here’s hoping you and I can stay on the creative side of that equation.

  

Be lazy

In my last post I put forth a principle (“see manipulability”) for thinking of ways to make things better. In this post I’m going to put forth a principle for helping people, which is this: be lazy.

I don’t mean for that to be taken at face value. I’m not saying people should avoid hard work and sit around all the time. What I’m saying is that we should always be looking for ways to produce the same results with less labor. That right there is pretty much a dictionary definition of efficiency, but efficiency is such an overused term these days that few people give much thought to what it actually looks like.

If you were to go into almost any professional environment in America and ask the people there if they are efficient workers, I doubt you’d get a single “No.” You might get people saying the company is inefficient, but they’d most likely blame it on another department. Everyone believes they themselves are efficient, in the same way everyone believes they themselves are smart and funny. But what most people call “efficiency” is really just laboring intensely. They think being efficient means moving fast. 

Real efficiency, though, is finding a method to make a two-hour job take 30 minutes. And without breaking a sweat in that 30 minutes, which is an important criterion. You might break a sweat in finding the method, but that’s okay. You’re working hard on a short-term project to make a long-term process a piece of cake. Laziness is the best driver for finding this kind of efficiency.

I’ll give an example from my life, which is what got me thinking about all this to begin with. Yesterday at work I built something that’s going to save all of us a nice chunk of labor. Every time we prepare a call for papers (each member of my department does about 40 per year) we have to format the text for our database. This involves stripping a Word file of its formatting and then applying formatting markups (similar to HTML) that our database can read and then display in proper format on our website. 

It doesn’t take a huge amount of time, but it’s tedious and just—broken. We have to take text that already looks the way we want it, unformat it, reformat it—just to get it looking the way it did to begin with? 

It seemed like there must be a way around this wasted effort. So I built something in Excel that will take text copied directly from Word and convert it into the markup code we use, which can then be copied and pasted directly into our database. It runs on a few formulas that look at the Word formatting and replace what we don’t want with what we do want. Now a job that used to take 10 minutes takes about one.

When I showed this to my coworkers, they were very pleased with me. I’m saving them a little bit of time and, more importantly, a lot of tedium. Boring tasks are demoralizing even if they don’t take that long. You’ll put them off if possible.

The thing is, though, I wasn’t really trying to help my coworkers. I was just trying to find a way that I personally could do less work. My little Excel converter is something I would want for myself even if I had no coworkers at all. It’s helping make my life easier. And then, incidentally, it does the same for others.

That’s why I say “be lazy” is a good principle for helping people. Don’t think about what others need. Think about what you need. What problems and time-sinks do you have that need solving? What in your life should be easier? Find a solution and let everyone else in on it. You are not unique. Any tedious or laborious task you face is surely faced by others. If you want out of it badly enough, you’ll discover a way to get everyone else out of it, too. 

See manipulability

I’m going to run through a (possibly boring) technical problem I solved today in order to illustrate what may be a larger truth.

In my job we publish thousands of externally authored PDFs on our website each year. Along with each PDF, we publish a considerable amount of metadata, which is also entered by these external authors. When we send this metadata to our hosting site, there are often errors in the characters entered by the authors (e.g., weird diacritics and such that our hosting site doesn’t recognize). We can’t publish the PDF until all metadata errors are corrected.  

Our hosting site tells us on which line of code the error occurred. The code isn’t meant for human readers, though. In many places it stretches over two page-widths (requiring the reader to scroll side-to-side to read it), and it has no line numbers. Also, the unrecognized characters come through in the code in hard-to-see ways. Trying to find the metadata error usually means poring over a good 200 to 400 lines of code with no real idea of what you’re looking for and only a vague idea of where.

It’s extremely frustrating for everyone. Today I found a solution. Copy the code from the hosting site, paste it in Word, select “Keep Text Only” in the paste options box, copy this text from Word, and paste it in Excel. Now the row numbers in Excel correspond exactly to the line numbers of the code. The hosting site tells you which line the error is on, so you just scroll to that row in Excel and—boom—you’ve found the bad character.

My company has been using this hosting site for over six years, and as far as I know, no one has ever come up with a solution to this problem other than “Just search through the code.” We publish over 18,000 of these manuscripts every year, and I’d estimate 1 in 25 has this kind of error. It adds up to hundreds of wasted man hours. It was the kid who’s been there 19 months who finally figured out how to cut that wasted by more than half.

But I’m not writing this just to gloat. I’m writing it because I learned something important. When I shared this solution with my colleagues, a couple of them asked me the same thing: “How did you think of this?” At the time I just smiled coyly and shrugged. But of course the real answer is more complicated.

If I were to answer that question honestly, it would have two parts: 1) I got pissed and 2) I started looking at what I could manipulate. The getting pissed part was crucial. This problem of code-searching was always frustrating, but today it was particularly bad. I was searching over and over for a bad character that seemed impossible to find. It was ruining my fucking day. Suddenly I felt like one of those cheap actors in an old commercial looking at the camera and saying, “There has to be a better way!” It was obvious to me that something was broken and badly needed to be fixed.

And then I started trying to see manipulability. What elements of the code could I work with? I noticed that each line of code was bracketed in syntactic markers. In my mind I actually came up with a more complicated solution that involved copying the code and doing some finding and replacing on these syntactic markers. As it happened, Word and Excel did that more complicated part of the algorithm for me. But still, I was looking for patterns that might allow me to tool the code into something more useable for a human being rather than a machine. That was the key. And once I had seen the pattern and gotten the idea of manipulating it, the solution to this problem seemed so obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t come up with it over a year ago when I was first trained on this stuff.

I think this is a good principle to carry around: see manipulability. See what strings you can grab onto. See what blocks you can rearrange. Most of us most of the time accept what we are given. Even when algorithms are broken, when processes are backward, we accept these deficiencies like we accept an illness. It’s a bitch, but what are you gonna do? We might feel there’s something wrong about how we’re doing something (or being told to do it), but we rarely get past that part. We get consumed in feelings of wrongness and forget to just look at what it is in front of us. Nearly everything has some kind of structure to it. And if you can find the structure, you can probably find a way to manipulate it.