Grimace (noun) - "A sharp contortion of the face expressive of pain, contempt, or disgust."
This is definitely one of the funniest stories I've heard in a while. So here's some background. At work I've been working on a system which I proposed a while back, and I've built from the ground up, so it's my little pet project. It also happens to be my technical project for grad school. These last few weeks, we launched a beta test of the system, which allowed a random sample of students to try out the system to see if they like it. We do this in order to find problems with the system that we overlooked, and to try to gain more acceptance of the system from our user base.
As part of our evaluation methodology, we let the student test drive the system while we record what they're doing on screen, and we record what they're saying because they're encouraged to talk while they're using the system.
So someone had the fabulous idea of giving staff a test drive of the new system, since they were eager to see it. My soul groaned when I heard this because I've become quite cynical about staff input into projects. The rule of thumb is, when you ask them for input before you start a project, you get no input. When you're nearing completion of a project and you show them, they give tons of random complaints, and rant about how they were never consulted in the matter.
Anyways, someone else in our extended team gave the beta test demonstration to a group of staff. So one of the things she's demonstrating is the ability to create an HTML webpage without needing to know HTML. A neat feature is that in the system, you can generate bulleted lists without having to program HTML.
A bulleted list looks like this:
After showing these bulleted lists, one of the staff members says this:
"I have employers who consider bullets to be violent images. They call them “points”. Which is why they often use 1,2,3 or a,b,c. I've seen in their meetings that they are careful to never mention the word bullets, but points."
When my boss told me about this result from the demonstration, I thought, oh ha ha, you got me, that's a good one, let's all laugh at me for falling for something so crazy, funny joke.
I grimaced when I found out that it was no joke. I heard the audio tape, and it was real. On the audio tape, I heard the person giving the demonstration give a nervous laugh in disbelief.
So because of this, they want us not to use those round circle things which happen to be called "bullets" because employers think they're violent?!?!?!? What kind of fluffy politically-correct offend-no-one garbage is this? More importantly, would you want to work for employers that are threatened by round circles on a paper?
What should we rename them to? Perhaps we could call them peace circles. How about equality rounds? Maybe inclusion spheres would be nice? Or, maybe to show them that bulleted lists aren't so bad, we could call them nuclear weapon cores, Hitler's dots, or mass-murder rounds.
Honestly, I think you need a good sense of humour when working with people like this. Otherwise you'd become a bitter cynical person that's dead on the inside.
I still think there's something in the water that makes people on the west coast think like this. Chris believes it's all the pot here in the west coast.
Anyone else have amusing work stories to share?
