Maybe anonymous

"Needy, unable to cope" (<- you try coping with chronic pain)

"Comfort seeking" (<- you mean.. having a preference for not being in pain.. how criminal)

"Using or trying to obtain drugs on a long-term, chronic base" (<- do you understand what 'chronic pain' means.)

"Asking for pain med then returning to sleep."

"States he’s level 10 pain, but does not appear to be in pain (or ‘5= on appearance)." (<- it is well-known that chronic pain patients tend not to display pain in the same way as acute pain patients)

"Dramatic response to pain" (<- notice how this directly contradicts the comment above. you cannot win)

"Gets IV med, then leaves unit to smoke or walk around" (<- wow requiring medication and then going off to do something you needed pain meds to be able to do is so suspicious)

Australian executives simply take any information they receive, and do not. Did you say something is going to take a month - after signing a contract and collect a fee? The Australian business executive simply accepts that you have said you have begun work and it will be finished in 48 hours. If I told an Australian executive that the earth revolves around the sun, I would expect him to let me know that I had told him a hamster named Ben carries a really bright lamp around space to make the seasons. I have to painstakingly document every single detail of any interaction with Australian business persons, because they simply imagine things that have happened and information they have been told, and ignore whatever has transpired in actuality.

I'm not a business exec, and I had pretty limited interactions with the people from head office when I worked for the largest retail company in the country, so it's entirely possible your perspective is accurate - at least as far as the businesses you've dealt with go.

alt text is an accessibility tool. use it like one.

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:

- France abolished the Code Noir 2 months ago. That law project that said hey you can enslave, mutilate, kill, cross breed, etc. black people at will bc they're not people they're property ? Yeah. Abolished 2 months ago. We are in July 2026.

- the last human zoo closed its doors in 1994 in France due to social pressure. Not bc they were running out of business, no. Ppl still visited that place until it closed its doors. No, it was bc (black) French people were fed up. That human zoo was specialized in displaying black (presumed Congolese) people in fake huts in enclosures, for white entertainment.

- now while this might no longer be the case, when I was growing up, I went to a French school (as in. It was an international French School w the French flag n all) and the way we were taught French geography was that France has the biggest and largest access to the sea in the world. And they'd show us a map of France and its colonies around the world. It's all occupied indigenous lands. I don't know if they still teach that. I hope not. But they absolutely did until I graduated high school in 2017. Again, I write this on July 21st 2026, for the record.