SciJediApprentice

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

Whereas the reality is far more like

Woke up this morning thinking about Princess Willamina. A sensible, brave, adventurous young lady from continental Europe around 800 years ago - who you will not have heard of. She was the protagonist in a l-o-n-g series of bedtime stories I told my daughter when she was very young. In fact, until today, nobody but my daughter and I had ever heard of her.

I was near tears about it, because - even I had almost forgotten her. Appalling. She was a great human being. Eight to ten years old, lived in a peaceful kingdom, had loving parents. Her daily activities were (surprisingly) similar to things that we do here on the farm, such as gathering nuts in the fall or visiting a lake. Although! an enchanted bear showed up when she was gathering chestnuts, and there were some merfolk in the lake. She was an amalgamation of everything I would have wanted for my own childhood and everything I wanted my 3 - 5 year old daughter to be growing toward.

   The princess has a nice life with a loving mother and father, but she gets a bit tired of all the royal rules and all the sameness and decided to set off on an adventure. She carefully packs some bread, cheese, and three lovely apples in a knapsack along with a pot of walnut dye, a sensible plain dress, and some plain sturdy boots. She sneaks off alone, dyes her blond hair with walnut dye, and changes into her other clothes. The princess dress gets carefully packed away, the sturdy boots get pulled on, and off goes Willamina over the wall via the branches of a low-hanging tree. She has dyed her hands and a bit of the back of her neck brown, as well, but she sets out very optimistically for adventure.

   It’s a lovely morning and Willamina starts off along a little-used road away from the castle. Before long she comes across a runaway horse. It has a saddle pad but no saddle, and the reins are trailing. She approaches it cautiously but it seems friendly enough; she leads it until she finds a downed tree the right size for her to use to mount. She hikes up her skirt, which is kind of embarrassing, and they ride along companionably enough. When they come to a village and ride into the square, someone asks her quite loudly why she is riding a stolen horse. A group of not-entirely-friendly grownups crowd around, and the situation goes downhill until Willamina stands up very tall and regal and tells the man in charge that she found the horse loose on the road, thank you very much, and she has every intention of returning him to his owner. The real owner of the horse comes hustling over, very relieved to see his horse again. Willamina can tell he’s the owner by the way the horse pricks up his ears and greets his master happily. She accepts his thanks with a gracious nod and the crowd melts away. It is midday by now, and Willamina goes to the shady side of the smithy and has a bite of bread and cheese, with some cool water from the well, to settle herself down.

   Some of the ladies of the village, led by one rather bossy woman named Mella, come over to the shady bench by the smithy where Willamina is resting and bluntly ask where she is headed and why a young girl is out by herself. She has been thinking about her brown-stained hands and quickly comes up with a good story to explain both things. She tells the ladies that she has been apprenticed to a dye-maker who lives nearby, and she is on her way to begin her 5 years of apprenticeship. “Oh, you must mean Old Maude,” exclaimed one of the friendlier women, “she could use some help at her age!” They give her directions to Maude’s cottage in the woods, two miles away, and Willamina gets underway immediately. She hikes most of the two miles and then takes a break at a particularly lovely spot in the woods. It is shady and there is a beautiful spring bubbling up. A thrush sings from a nearby bush, as if he is singing just for her. She takes a while to appreciate the peace and quiet, because there is always something happening at the castle. The thrush sounds prettier to her at that moment than the best royal musicians. Then she continues on her way to Old Maude’s house.

   When she approaches Old Maude’s tiny thatched cottage she decided she better tell her who she truly is, because it wouldn’t be fair to fib about being an apprentice. Then she gets quite nervous about the fact that she is dressed as simply as a farm girl, stained brown from walnut husk dye, and smelling a bit like horse. Maude comes to the door, surprised to see a visitor. Willamina stands straight and tall and tells Maude who she is and how she came to be there. Maude’s hands are stained, too, so deeply that they might never come clean, but she is a wise and kind old woman, and she knows the truth when she hears it. “Come in, your highness,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. Willamina enters the cottage and looks around in delight. The alls are lined with drawers, small and large, and the drawers are full of all the things Maude uses to make dyes. Walnut husks and onion skin, flower petals and dried berries. Each one adds a scent to the air, and Willamina takes a deep, happy breath. There is a pot cooking on the fire in the big, stone hearth, but it contains a stew for Maude’s dinner, not dyes. The dye pots and ladles are hanging on a beam on one side of the chimney and the cooking things, fewer in number, hang on the other side. “No good mixing up the pots,” Maude explains, “it’d do your stomach no good at all to get a dose of goldenrod dye!” There are also bunches of herbs hanging from the beams to dry, and a string of onions and garlic. They sit together on a bench, and Maude picks up her knitting and proposes that they trade stories. She will tell Willamina one story about dye-making or peasant life for every one that Willamina tells her about the king, the queen, or the goings-on at the castle. Willamina thinks about all the commotion of the castle; the feasts and parades, the foreign ambassadors with their unusual clothes and accents, even the big cathedral where they worship on Sundays. She looks around Maude’s small, quiet home, where the half-grown kitten playing on the hearth is the only entertainment. She knows she can trade Maude some good stories! And so they pass the afternoon.

[X]

sun is a deadly laser,

stay safe everyone

Bert: Bert and I

Ernie: Bert and I, we've been best friends forever, but we're also something else too!

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.