Chutzpah

There's a Jewish hip hop group called Chutzpah. That is so entirely perfect. What else would you call a Jewish hip hop group?

Coupling

I've recently been working my way through the British sitcom series "Coupling", via Netflix. I'd first caught an episode on PBS very late at night, and was soon laughing so hard my wife came in from the other room to see why. It's essentially about three men and three women and their various romantic (and often sexual) adventures, but that description really doesn't do it justice. It's reasonably accurate to call it a British "Friends" with much earthier and more insightful humor and a far more creative approach. Several episodes use unconventional methods of telling the story (scenes shown out of order, etc.), especially by sitcom standards. If you rent it, I'd suggest trying at least the first two episodes, as the first one is a little weak by the standards of the rest of the series, if I recall correctly, probably because it carries the burden of setting up the relationships of the characters from then on.

One of my favorite bits involves one of the characters trying to pick up a woman from another country in a bar. She speaks no English, and he doesn't speak a word of her language (Hebrew). We first see the scene played from his point of view, then we see it from her point of view, with her now speaking English and him speaking a sort of pidgin Italian that he seemed to be improvising on the spot.

Another favorite is a scene played out through a subtext filter, meaning that the characters are all saying exactly what they mean, as opposed to the words they actually used.

But I think the best scene of the series that I've seen to this point is at the end of the episode "Inferno", in which the main male character attempts to explain the plot of a pornographic film called "Lesbian Spank Inferno" in terms that make it seem more artistic than the title would suggest.

For the most part, "Coupling" is played as a farce, with some typical dating/relationship issue starting out in a relatively normal way, then wildly escalating due to some misunderstanding or miscommunication. However, there are also occasional serious moments that tell us a lot about relationships, such as the end of season two.

NBC attempted an American version as a replacement for "Friends", which I haven't seen, but heard was a complete disaster by all accounts. If you've seen the American version, don't let that stop you from trying the British version. I'd heard they used the original scripts, only slightly modified for an American audience, and for some reason it just didn't work. The problem might have been that some of the funniest bits might have had to be cut or modified significantly to meet American television standards of censorship, and the full impact of the humor might not have survived the cuts.

All of the actors do a fine job, but what really makes the show are the scripts by Steven Moffatt. Between "Coupling", "Jekyll", and his award-winning episodes of Doctor Who, I've become quite a fan, and I'd be willing to take a good look at anything written by him in the future.

More Eyes Would Be Better, Right?

Years ago, I was in management with the corporation I still work for (though in a different capacity). Upper management had decided they'd had enough of a particular kind of mistake being made, and so they made a rule that whenever one of your subordinates made that kind of mistake, you had to go to a big meeting in front of everybody else in management and explain to the entire group why that mistake had been made and what procedural change you were implementing to prevent it from happening ever again.

I can't fault upper management for taking a position that a certain type of mistake is unacceptable and trying to do something about it, but it doesn't take a genius to see how ridiculous this way of handling it is. On one particular occasion, one of my people made the Mistake of Doom. When I questioned her about it, she replied that she was well aware of exactly what the procedure was and exactly how unacceptable that mistake was, but she'd simply slipped up. She was human; what can you say to that? I had to come up with some lame procedural change for the meeting, but at the end of the day, the fact is that human beings mess up from time to time, no matter how unacceptable that mistake may be and how careful the person who makes it was being.

I found myself reminded of this story last week when something happened to one of my peers, but it requires a little background to lead up to it. My job is complicated and the stakes are high. There can be serious legal consequences if we make the wrong kind of mistake. Furthermore, we're required to constantly multitask and everything is on an extremely tight deadline. Someone decided several years back that it'd be a Good Idea to take one of the most experienced people and have him monitor everybody's work on an especially complex subprocess to make sure we did a better job with it. And sure enough, everybody took his advice and the subprocess improved.

Time passed, and upper management decided that it worked once, so it'd be another Good Idea to add a similar review for another subprocess. Then over the last two years or so they added another two. So not only do we have our actual superior watching what we do, we also have no less than four other people looking over our work and telling us how to do things better. As you can imagine, it gets more than a little frustrating having four very experienced people going over your work with a fine tooth comb looking for mistakes. It's not a question of if they're going to find mistakes; it's a question of how many and how big the mistakes they find will be. My very competent peer was being nitpicked over a minor error noticed by one of those reviewing people, and had to explain why she'd made the error and how she was going to avoid making it again in the future. The simple truth is, when you're doing everything as fast as you can and getting interrupted by someone roughly every three minutes, you're doing extremely well if your mistakes are occasional and minor.

I have this Paranoia-style vision of management deciding that we're not productive enough, so they keep pulling the most experienced people away from the actual work to review everybody else's work, until you eventually have thirty two people standing around the one person doing the actual work, each of them yelling advice simultaneously (and some of that advice being contradictory). We're not there yet, but we're working on it.

Greetings from Corporate America!

Our working group was recently pulled into a meeting where we played each person's recorded phone greeting (the one people get if we're already on the phone) in turn and were encouraged to critique them. This struck everybody as a little strange, because we're all supposed to use the same wording. In practice, there were little variations, but nothing major. The boss wanted us to sound more enthusiastic in general, but other than that nothing much came of it. This left us mystified, because we took roughly an hour of our working day from jobs where being extremely pressed for time is a given, for what seemed like no good reason.

One of my peers figured it out a little while afterward. There's a big push from high levels to improve our customer service numbers, and apparently somebody feels that finding some way to improve our greetings will have that impact. My own opinion is that there are much better ways to pursue that goal.

My guess is that changing things that would actually improve customer service (like putting resources into getting checks issued to people more quickly) would involve spending money, and they're unwilling or unable to do that. Changing our greetings is effectively free. Someone at a high level has been assigned to improve customer service results and doesn't have the authority or budget to address any real issues, so he or she had to come up with something that looked good, even if it didn't have any real impact.

In the corporate world, it's important to be perceived as doing something, especially if you're not. And thus, the nonsensical meeting.

I was going to stop throwing bricks at the corporate world for a while after posting this one, but something happened today that I can't resist. In fact, I plan to write a version of it into a Paranoia scenario. However, I'll leave that particular brick for another day.

"Thank You for Calling Big Honkin Corporation. I'm So Effin' Happy You Called that I Could Just Scream...

This call may be monitored or recorded for Bad Things to hold against me in my annual review. How may I help you?"

How does that sound to you? With a few alterations to protect the identity of my employer (and allow me to keep my job), this is the length of the new greeting I'm now required to use at work. You've probably heard similar greetings if you have any reason to call a sufficiently large company. I don't know about you, but hearing this lengthy run of drivel doesn't leave me feeling warm and fuzzy about the company I'm calling.

I knew this was coming because I'd had reason to call the Even Larger Corporation that owns the Very Large Corporation that I work for, and heard this sort of greeting when I called them. I figured it was only a matter of time before we shared the joy as well, and I was right.

So why do we have such a ridiculously long greeting? Well, the "monitored or recorded" part is supposed to be a legal requirement, even though there's supposed to be a pre-recorded message saying the same thing that callers hear before they get to us, so it sounds like duplication to me. My guess is that there was a committee talking about what to put in the greeting, and everybody felt they had to add something to show they were participating in the process. And I'd also guess that not one of them read it out loud even once.

Does anyone really think such a greeting sounds friendly or natural? And if not, why require it?

This is just the tip of a particularly goofy iceberg. More on that another time...

Mister Twister

After the second slot of PoliCon, most of the group went out to a diner together. I spent most of the dinner break with Teddy, one of the players from my Sorcerer game, and her husband Josh. It turns out that Josh entertains at parties by making balloon animals. I hadn't known that there was a word for people who do that. They're called twisters.

Josh had just come from a job, so he had his balloons with him in a sort of customized apron. He started making balloon animals while we were at the diner, and as it turns out, the con's guest of honor is a twister as well, so before too long, both of them were making various things out of balloons. The waitress received her tip in the hand of a balloon version of Sesame Street's Elmo, and several people who weren't part of our group left the restaurant that day with a balloon animal in hand.

The cool thing about this was watching everybody else in the diner. For the cost of a few bucks' worth of balloons, the whole room was full of smiles, and I'd be willing to bet that most of the people there brought those smiles home and told their families about those guys who were making balloon animals in the diner that day, spreading those smiles even further. It's a Very Good Thing to bring so much joy into the world so cheaply.

An Incident at the Grocery Store

My wife and I were both feeling under the weather this past week, but one of us had to go to the grocery store for essentials. Since I was feeling marginally better than she was, I was the more sensible choice, so off I went.

I picked up the things I needed and was in line at the register, being rung out. I was facing the girl at the register, so the next person in line was coming toward my left side. Since I wasn't feeling well, I have to admit that I wasn't as aware of my surroundings as usual and didn't see who it was, other than registering that there was a person approaching from that side.

As I was standing there, I suddenly felt a hard impact on my left thigh. Fortunately, I had my weight solidly distributed, so I didn't lose my balance, but the impact was hard enough to hurt. So I looked up to my left to see an upscale woman, probably in her late 60's, wearing a lot of make-up and clearly artificial red hair coloring, who had just pushed her cart into my leg with as much strength as she could muster. She was still glaring down at her grocery cart after having placed her items on the conveyor belt that moves stuff up to the register. She looked a bit more irritated than when I first looked at her, then pushed her cart into my leg again as hard as she could. She wasn't able to build up as much momentum this time, so it didn't really hurt, but it was annoying. She repeated this several times, still glaring down at her cart as though it was responsible for her not moving forward, while I tried to clear my head enough to decide what to say to her, if anything. The girl at the register was busy taking my money and getting my change, so she didn't notice what was happening. I tried to think of what I could say to her to make her stop, but since I wasn't feeling well, I was in a bad mood and most of what came to mind wasn't very pleasant. I realized that saying any of the things I had in mind was unlikely to improve the situation in any way. She continued to push during the entire time I was considering my options, never once looking up from the cart.

By this time, I was more amused by her complete obliviousness than annoyed by it, so I said nothing, took my change and my groceries, and left. I took one last look back at her to see what she'd do when the resistance stopped. Her expression changed to one of satisfaction as she moved forward, still not so much as glancing at me.

I'd love to know what was going on in her mind during the whole process. I don't know if she was genuinely clueless that I was there, or if she didn't know what to say after realizing what she'd done and thought it most socially graceful to continue to appear to be unaware. My best guess is that she was focused on her holiday grocery shopping and really had no idea what she was doing. The holidays sometimes have that effect on people.

Enjoy the seasonal festival of your choice, and don't forget that however busy you are, other people are people, too!

Talk Like a Pirate Day

September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. I'm sure you hadn't forgotten, but just in case you had, here's a reminder.

I'd talk like a pirate in this entry, but as I write this, Talk Like a Pirate Day isn't until tomorrow, so it's just not time yet.

And if ninjas are more your style, well, December 5th isn't that far away.