The Adjective Noun

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.

A nuisance alarm is a repeated false alarm. Like a fly buzzing in your ear, nuisance alarms start becoming an annoyance you just swat at to make them go away. "Oh, the temperature alarm in the cold room is going off again? Just hit reset, it always does that, management won't buy us a new one but the temperature is never too high so it's fine," et cetera. This means that when the alarm is going off for real -- the temperature in the cold room is actually too high -- recognition of the situation is delayed due to the habit of distrusting the alarm. This is something that is acknowledged and tempered in industries where it is very important for alarms to not be ignored (aviation, for eg.), but elsewhere, it can cause a lot of issues.

I'm not saying the error messages in the above story are nuisance alarms. In fact, they're the true alarms: they're the information getting lost in the noise.

In this scenario, the nuisance alarms are ads.

We have been conditioned to react with hostility to pop-ups because they are so frequently something that require hostility! All you want to do is read this delicious-sounding chocolate cake recipe on your favourite blogger's website, so why is your screen now filled with pop-ups asking you to sign up for a mailing list, and to buy this spatula on Temu, and to accept all cookies (I thought this was cake?). The solution? That little X in the upper corner, again and again and again. Ah, a clear screen, now you can read the cake recipe in relative peace.

It's understandable how that same behaviour could translate to other pop-ups, particularly if the error message sort are encountered far less frequently than the advertising sort. You're at work and you're just trying to run the program you always run, but it spits a pop-up at you. And we know how to fix a pop-up -- the little X. But the program still isn't running. You restart it in the hopes that will work, X the annoying pop-up again, and bah, no dice! Then the IT person asks what the pop-up says, and you're baffled because, well, it doesn't matter. It's just a pop-up. It's unimportant and exists to be closed. The IT person tells you that this pop-up is important and explains what you need to know, and you feel silly because how were you supposed to know that this time, this one pop-up was important?

Body Horror: Things that cannot happen in real life. EX: The Thing, stomach mouths, eyes on hands, etc

Gore: Fresh injuries, often severe. EX: Severed leg, gutspill, deep gashes, etc

NEITHER: Healed injuries and burns, congenital differences, missing appendages, etc. If I could theoretically go to the store and see that character browsing the isles- It isn't body horror or gore. That's just a person. *AND the amount of people that tag, not just fictional characters, but real human beings as body horror is staggering. Its not solely a fandom issue, ableism and bigotry against anyone that looks sufficiently "different" is prevalent in real life and has devastating consequences.

Normally I wouldn’t remark on my romps through etymology, but “hlafweard” is a compound of hlaf, or loaf, and weard, which means guardian (see also Ward or Warden, etc). Meaning that when you call someone a lord you are calling him an esteemed keeper of the bread. 

HEY THERE BREADBOX PETER WIMSEY. LOAF GUARD PALPATINE. BREAD CLIP VETINARI. 

Lady also derives from hlaf, but in this case hlafdige or bread kneader. She makes the bread, he monitors it. Women have to do all the work as usual. 

Now, the reason I was looking this up was that I wanted to develop a gender-neutral analogue to lord/lady; there are analogues already out there naturally, but the Shivadh must be different and anyway I didn’t like the ones I’d seen suggested online. 

Given that the origins of Lord and Lady aren’t all that strongly gendered anyway (they’re about what the person does, not what their gender is), I decided that if a woman is a bread-kneader and a man is a bread-guarder, a nonbinary person should be A BREAD EATER, which would be Hlafetan.  

Pet Foolery, #93

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3