“This request is coming in really late.”

“Yeah, I know. Can you gin something up?”

“Probably. Maybe something like the one we did last week. It would work well for this.”

“Which one is that?”

“The two column layout. With the image running across the top of both columns. Something like that.”

“Hmm…”

“It would look like—got a pen? Thanks. Here… like that. You could drop the copy in right there.”

“Well…”

Pause.

“I know it’s really late, but can you mock it up for me? I’m really more of a visual person.”

“You know that implies exactly the opposite of what you intended, right?”

“What?”

“That means you can envision it without actually having to do it.”

Another pause.

“Like if I said I was a ‘plumbing person,’ I could conceive of how to set up a water heater without actually cutting pipes and sticking them together. But what you’re saying is you lack a visual imagination. Think about it.”

Someone is grinning now.

“Stop being a jerk.”

Here’s one for all you public speakers out there.

Found this gem gathering dust on an old FireWire drive, something from my days working the dials at an audio booth. Part of the standard post-production dance for voiceover gigs means editing out breath noises, tongue clicks, mystery pops and other sundry gymnastics of the human mouth. That includes the stretches where folks just sit there and go “Uhhhhh…”

So one day this fellow stepped into the booth to ad lib a spot for some pro bono work. Only thing was, he wasn’t a trained actor or even a regular public speaker. And it showed in spades. The cheek quotient must have been running pretty high at the office that day, because instead of deleting those bits from the master I cobbled them together into a solid half minute Wall of Uhh (replete with cheesy background music). Take a listen.

Luckily for me he had a great sense of humor about the whole thing, and was as resilient as I was silly.

So crank it up and let ‘er, uhh, rip.

The phone is ringing again. When I pick it up, the owner of the voice in my ear is clearly at his wit’s end. He’s not just mad at his computer, he’s pissed at his computer.

Any designer could benefit from a stint in tech support. The in-the-trenches view of user behavior, along with an audience close enough to take a swing and actually connect, is priceless. Lessons meted out at the hands of Mother Experience. “No, toasters don’t make great bathtub accessories. Ask us how we know.”

Which always takes me back to this memory from an office far, far away, during a distant, earlier epoch of my life.

Gimme Input

In his office, faced with the offending machine, we begin The Assessment.

No matter where he clicks, a contextual menu is popping up. Plain old single-button mouse connected to a perfectly innocent looking Mac. Angry jabs at the mouse ensue as he demonstrates. Click—pop, a menu on the desktop. Click—pop, another menu on the desktop.

I’m standing just to the side of his desk, frozen in place, mouth hanging ever so slightly agape. Before my mind could even begin it’s customary scroll through the exotic points-of-failure checklist, the eyes had done a scan of the scene and returned back with a full report. I’m still standing where that report halted me.

Really? Another quick glance, just to be sure. Yes… really.

An awkward moment passes.

I lean forward, and with both hands gingerly pick up the book that’s sitting on the edge of his keyboard—plunked directly on top of the Control key.

My inbox knows how to rock.

For a while there I was getting inundated with a full-on torrent of those crazy “un-training” spams, marked not only by their oddball content (“Hey, check it! More James Joyce quotes!”) but also by those random non sequitur subject lines (“Octopi Either? Didn’t we see them at the Bowery Ballroom last year?”). The longer it went on the more it read like Monty Python’s “Rock Notes” sketch. So I started saving the choicest gems, in the hope of one day pointing some aspiring indie band towards a spam-fueled new moniker.

I give you the winners, in no particular order:

• Romeo Foot
• Arable Honeycomb
• Mandarin Fulcrum
• Indescribable Refinery
• Horsepower Charisma
• Marathon Kicks
• Tongs Ding-Dong
• Octopi Either
• Incalculable Lightweight
• Next Best Maverick
• Pincushion Copier
• Crackadobe Ghost
• Montreal Gunman
• Strep Throat Taper
• Charcoal Calculator
• Gland Theological
• Melon Go Lightly
• Luminary Barefoot
• Monty Delarosa
• High-Minded Pivot
• Godforsaken Snobbery
• Immaterial Air Force
• Sundown Excommunication
• Brittany Murphy’s Disorder Denial

There’s a cockroach in the hallway. And it’s big. Enough so that I’m checking for a license plate number.

The doorman is performing an impressive little interpretive dance number trying to shoo it away. Balanced on one foot, swinging the other wildly with arms flailing. It’s some variant of The Twist we’ll call Don’t Touch the Critter.

The bug, for its part, is still ambling across the floor like a little drunken tourist.

There’s a pause, and now he’s back with a can of air freshener (no Raid to be found) in a bizarre attempt to somehow spray the thing away. Don’t ask me, I just live here. Maybe roaches have an aversion to Spring Freshness I never knew about.

After a few sprays only prove to make things wet, another pause. He screws up his face and walks off, a man on a mission.

When he returns he has the fire extinguisher in his hands.

“Hey, wait—!”

Ga-WHOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The air between us has gone opaque with a floor-to-ceiling cloud of nebulous white can’t-see-shitness. Powder everywhere, dense and choking. It looks like someone dropped a hand grenade in grandma’s makeup bag. From the other side of the mass I can hear his heavy accent lilting across a torrent of obscenity.

“Sheeeeeet! Sheeet, sheeet, sheeet!!!”

What he lacks in vocabulary he’s making up for with sheer enthusiasm.

The cloud is advancing and I’m starting to creep backwards on my heels. The hallway is narrow and I really don’t want to be sucking this junk down my lungs. Slight breezes from I-don’t-know-where are carving strange patterns in the powder as it drifts downward. It would all be quite beautiful if it wasn’t also so simultaneously screwed-in-the-head. A fire extinguisher? What were you thinking, MacGyver?

“Holy shit!!! What the fuck is that?! Is the building on fire?! Oh my God!!!”

Out in the lobby the natives have spotted the floor show. They are, oh, a tad inquisitive.

Now he’s out there talking to them, palms out, arms in front like he’s holding back an invisible wall that’s extremely close and pressing. A bald-faced denial of the patently obvious is taking place, even as an ominously large cloud slides in around him from behind. These are not the droids you are looking for. This ship is unsinkable. Of course I can drive, officer.

What could someone possibly say to get you to casually walk away from a huge cloud of billowing white smoke in your own home? Think about it. Yet somehow it’s working. They’re moving away. They’re going back to their daily chores, running their errands. Man, you need to run for office.

We return to the hallway. The dust has settled (quite literally) into an odd fire-retardant winter. Looking closely at the fresh fall of chemical snow I can make out the tiny but unmistakable trails left by six little insect legs scampering their way to freedom.

Forget this. Next time I’m just squashing your ass.

It’s not often that Photoshop belches this hard, so this is all the more surprising. Disturbingly vague? Oh, a tad. At least they offer the option of a little more information after scaring your pants off.

Damn. And here I was all set to itemize my illegal kickbacks this year.

I get what the writers of this gem thought they were saying. Our program just did its thing and everything is A-OK. But that isn’t what they said. Not even close. This alert is telling me that it has, apparently, just scanned itself—while simultaneously alerting me to that fact—demonstrating that the parent application has spawned some mind-bending new form of recursion that warps the laws of space and time as we know them. If I took this dialog box at face value I would expect my computer to disappear in a blinding flash of antimatter.

To be fair, I suspect that there’s a null value or empty string mistakenly being passed along here, but that’s exactly the sort of thing that the application should catch before it’s presented to the end user.

This dialog box should take a tip from Handbrake, the open source DVD-ripping app, which scores remarkably high marks in the brutal honesty department. (And yes, this is an actual screenshot from a publicly available version of the app…)