Interior of a low-rise office park. A nameless DEPARTMENT HEAD is sitting by himself in a small, sterile conference room. On the whiteboard behind him, a diagram of a nondescript computer system is scribbled across.

The door opens.

DEPARTMENT HEAD: Ah, Johnson, isn’t it? Have a seat. How’s… (shuffles notes)… how’s the family?

JOHNSON: Thank you, sir. My wife’s pregnant with our second. Due in May.

DEPARTMENT HEAD: (nods curtly) Right… well, Johnson…

JOHNSON: Yes?

DEPARTMENT: There is no easy way to say this. Johnson… this meeting… (clears throat) this meeting is not happening.

JOHNSON: I beg your pardon?

DEPARTMENT HEAD: Think about the cosmos. Order to chaos. Big Bang to heat death. The march of entropy. The thermodynamic arrow of time.

JOHNSON: I’m still not quite following.

DEPARTMENT HEAD: (gestures wildly) Yet, even amidst decay, random fluctuations happen! Particles pop into existence, stars form, planets! Give it enough time, Johnson, and something as improbable as us comes to be!

JOHNSON: The meeting, sir?

DEPARTMENT HEAD: Consider the odds! What’s more likely from chaos — a planet of eight billion people hurling through space, or a single brain hallucinating a world that doesn’t exist?

JOHNSON: That sounds absurd! Wouldn’t such a brain quickly shut down?

DEPARTMENT HEAD: Oh, it would. But what is time? A collection of memories, indistinguishable from hallucinations of a solitary mind. Think of the probabilities, Johnson! A universe or a dream? You were never here. I never spoke these words.

JOHNSON: (stammering) I don’t know… I don’t know what to say.

DEPARTMENT HEAD: Looks like we’re at time. That’ll be all for today. Please give my regards to your wife.

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Hovertext:
Ten years from now, during my Unreadable Mystery Author phase, this will be the first thing I work on.

Way back around 2009, Google did something stupid internally where people with names like "Nishit" were flagged as being "fake" or similar. I probably found out about this because I had worked on the accounts system at one point.

On the surface, it seemed simple enough: someone coded up a check to pick up an "four letter word" (in English...) and it matched it. Even though it's totally a name used by a lot of people, their systems told those people that they were invalid and unwelcome. Never mind they have employees that are directly affected by this.

Ten years later, nearly the same thing happened at Lyft. It happened late in 2019 as it rolled into 2020. The timing always made me think that someone particularly clueless was trying to make one final push to meet their so-called "quarterly goals" before the year ended.

These events, and others like it, have touched off a series of posts like "falsehoods that programmers assume about names", and then its own series of posts about whole other realms which are full of trouble.

I, too, have written about this. I mentioned how the Intel museum only allowed the ASCII characters A-Z as letters in your name, and anyone else was out of luck.

All along, I have been treating this as a case of "those fucking stupid programmers", and it's an easy groove to fall into, because believe me, there are quite a few really incompetent people out there doing this kind of work.

However, I've been starting to realize that this is overly simplistic and is missing a large possibility. Can you see it yet? I sure didn't for a very long time, and that time is immortalized in my older posts.

The thing that finally got me thinking about another side to this problem was when I went to get my hair done recently. The scheduling form on my salon's web site had a list of stylists with their names given. One stylist had a name that had a rather unusual consonant pair that you don't normally see in English. I wasn't really sure how to pronounce it.

Let's say her name was shown as "RJAY", even though that's not even remotely close to the real thing for both her sake and mine. I thought that was her name, and went with that, until finally I saw how she wrote it out: "R'Jay". That's when I finally understood.

The booking system had decided that an apostrophe was a bridge too far and had just dropped it, thus reducing a fairly easy-to-pronounce name to a blob of characters that isn't her damn name! That it also forced everything into capitals didn't help things.

As she worked on my hair, we got to talking about things and that in particular, and I admitted that I had worked at places that had also screwed people's names up badly. I told her about asking the person at Lyft to "if nothing else, promise you won't do it again" and only getting a blank look in response. Then, perhaps because of recent goings-on in the world, I finally saw another possibility for why it might be happening. It's not necessarily clueless programmers, much as I'd like to bag on them for being that way.

We owe it to ourselves and to those around us to admit the possibility that some of these people are doing it on purpose. They're being unmitigated assholes because they realize they can use their position to make someone else's life a little crappier.

Get it? "Assuming best intent" is probably a mistake. When there are enough people being hateful around you, that is no longer an option.

Hanlon's Razor falls down in this kind of environment. It's lazy.

I have definitely made this mistake. You need not go particularly far back in my posts to find that I wrote my "honest troubleshooting code of conduct" which incorporates exactly that. Actual life experience now says that leaning on that is the lazy way out, and that you actually have to do some damn work to figure out exactly what's going on.

It's stuff like this that makes me realize just how much I still do not know, even though some people *have* to know this, and have no choice in the matter. I'm finding it out much later, and while it bothers me that it's taken this long to even get started, it's not going to stop me from admitting my ignorance while pushing to understand more.

While I may never truly understand some of the things that are not daily lived truths for me (and are for others), I can always work towards realizing that it exists, it's valid, and it needs to be appreciated.

Oh, and finally, it's not the responsibility of folks like my stylist to explain it to me. They have enough work to do as it is.

aaronstjames:

One of our fabric sales reps came in for an appointment yesterday and we ended up talking about the long term impacts of the pandemic. The home quilting market is predominantly a conservative customer base, so when COVID precautions were politicized, those ladies followed along and didn’t get vaccinated, didn’t wear masks, etc. Now many of them are dead. Most of the fabric stores in the conservative regions that our reps call on have lost twenty percent of their customers. The ladies the shop knew by name because they could be counted on for annual trade-in upgrades of $9000 sewing machines? Dead. Viking is laying off half of its staff. It’s taken two years for the impact to become obvious, but the home sewing industry in the US is in shambles. A lot of experience, knowledge and artistry was lost and when the independent shops have to close, we’ll lose even more.

Good Evening, Burkwood Hills Families—

Due to expected inclement weather, the Burkwood Hills school district is moving to a Flexible Instruction Day (FID) tomorrow. All students should log in virtually for instruction and follow their typical daily schedule. And by “typical daily schedule,” we mean an absolute clusterfuck of pleading and consequence-threatening to get your kids to do literally any of their required work while you also somehow do your job from home. You will break down emotionally and spiritually multiple times throughout the day and annoy everyone in your family.

Scheduled activities will include playing Twister with the cats in a pile of Magna-Tiles, crying, throwing half-eaten Uncrustables at the kitchen window, running manically through the house in pajamas, watching TV, more crying, and eating a gross ton of Z-Bars.

Students will log onto their twelve-year-old tablet with no power cord for a Zoom call with twenty other children, most of whom are screaming into their screens, asking what to do. Eventually, your child’s teacher’s exhausted face will appear and go through an inaudible PowerPoint presentation about addition or phonics that your child will utterly ignore. The teacher will then email you a worksheet. You will go through the worksheet with your child, who is now distracted by his brother hanging off the side of the table, throwing gobs of Fisher-Price slime at the dog, screaming, “I’m Spider-Man! I’m Spider-Man!” You will end up doing the worksheet in your child’s handwriting.

All afterschool and evening activities will proceed as scheduled. You cannot imagine what these might be, but they are likely attended by parents who have it more together than you. Parents on the PTA. Parents who hand out snacks at soccer games. Parents who make costumes for the school plays, even for kids who are not their own. That is not you—therefore, please disregard the announcement about afterschool and evening activities.

Why did you study the humanities in college? Why didn’t you do what your uncle suggested and go into engineering? Or study law like your mom wanted? Then you might have a high-paying job and could afford to send your children to private school, where snow days are probably spent at the museum appreciating fine art or planting trees. No, you had to study English literature, and you now teach at one of several dying colleges, shuttling between blank-walled classrooms and bussing home frantically to trade off with your spouse, who is attending to the nightmare of Flexible Instruction Day. The article you are supposed to be writing is not even half-done, and your kids are eating chocolate chips straight out of the bag.

What is wrong with you? When did your life become like this? Don’t even think about blaming the economy. Your single mother worked three jobs and helped you and your siblings with homework in the evenings. You started crying the other day because you couldn’t open a jar of banana peppers. There are parents fleeing from terrorism and war who manage to read their children stories before bed. Meanwhile, last night before bed, you watched three TikToks with your kids, and one of them had the word “fuck” in it

If you don’t get your shit together parenting-wise, your kids are going to start thinking that being a YouTuber is a viable career path. One day, they’ll have to go to an important dinner with their boss and be unable to eat anything but chicken nuggets, embarrass themselves, get fired, and die. They’ll forget how to read, which is probably impossible, but if any kids could test this limit, it’s them.

All staff, besides the facilities department, should feel free to work from home or come into the building if they like. Members of the facilities department should report to work based on virtual instruction protocol per their supervisor. Parents should fuck off and die but also make sure their children somehow complete a full day of schoolwork.

Thank you for your patience (lol),
BHSD Administration

“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.

I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.

If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID.  There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies.  It’s pretty depressing.  

So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.


The political one first.  I worked for years in the small former Soviet republic of Moldova.



Moldova happened to be one of the few parts of the old USSR suitable for producing wine.  The other was Georgia, in the Caucasus.

The Soviets, in their central planning way, decided that both Moldova and Georgia would produce wine — but Georgia would produce the good stuff, intended for export and for consumption by Soviet elites.  Moldova would produce cheap sweet reds, which is what most Russians think wine is.

So for decades, Moldova produced bad wine and nothing but bad wine.  But Russians liked it, so that was okay.

Then the USSR collapsed.  And, well, Moldova continued to produce nasty cheap sweet reds, because that was all they could do.   By the turn of the century, wine was Moldova’s single biggest cash export.  And about 80% of that wine went straight to Russia.

This continued through the 1990s and into the early 2000s.  Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia.  Back in 2003 or so, he wasn’t invading Russia’s neighbors… but he was already swinging a big stick in Russia’s “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics that he thought should still be under Russia’s thumb.  Which absolutely included Moldova.

So whenever the Moldovan government annoyed or offended Putin… or whenever he just wanted to yank their chain… the Russian Ministry of Health would suddenly discover that there was a “problem” with Moldovan wine.  And imports would be frozen until the “problem” could be resolved.  Since wine was Moldova’s biggest export, and most wine went to Russia, this meant that Russia could inflict crippling damage on Moldova’s economy literally at will.  

This went on for over a decade, with multiple Moldovan governments having to defer to Moscow rather than face crippling economic damage.

Enter USAID.  Over a period of a dozen years or so, USAID funded several projects to restructure the Moldovan wine industry. 

They brought in foreign instructors to teach modern methods.  They worked with the wine-growers to develop training courses.  They provided guarantees for loans so that farmers could buy new equipment.  They helped Moldovan farmers get access to new varieties of grapes… you get the idea.

(By the by, the wine project was not my project. But it was literally up the street from my project.  It was run by two people I know and deeply respect — one American, one Moldovan — so I had a ring-side seat for much of this.)

The big one was, they worked with the Moldovans on what we call market linkages.  That is, they helped them connect to buyers and distributors in Europe, and figure out ways to sell into the EU.  I say this was the big one, because on one hand the EU is the world’s largest market for wine!  But on the other hand, exporting wine into the EU is really hard.  There are a bunch of what we call NTBTs — “non-tariff barriers to trade”.  For starters, your wine has to be guaranteed clean and safe according to the EU’s very high standards.  That means it has to consistently pass a bunch of sanitary and health tests, and also your production methods have to be certified.  Then there are a bunch more requirements about bottling, labelling and packaging. 

The EU regulates the hell out of all that stuff.  Like, the “TAVA” number?  There’s a minimum font size for that.  If you print it too small, it’ll be bounced right back to you.  The glass of the bottle?   Has to be a sort that EU recycling systems can deal with.  The adhesive behind the label?  It can be rejected for being too weak (labels fall off) or too strong (recycling system can’t remove it).  There are dozens of things like that.

And then of course they had to do marketing.  Nobody in Europe had heard of Moldovan wines!  Buyers and distributors had to be talked into taking a chance on these new products.  This meant the Moldovan exporters needed lines of credit to stay afloat.  This in turn meant that Moldovan banks had to be talked into… you get the idea.

This whole effort took over a decade, from the early 2000s into the teens.

And in the end it was a huge damn success.  With USAID help, the Moldovan wine industry was completely restructured.  Moldova now exports about $150 million of wine per year, which is a lot for a small country — it’s over $50 per Moldovan.  And it went from exporting around 80% of its wine to Russia, to around 15%.  Most Moldovan wine (around 60%) now goes to the EU, with an increasing share going to Turkey and the Middle East.  



(If you’re curious: their market niche is medium to high end vins du table.  Not plonk, not fancy, just good midlist wines.  I can personally recommend the dryer reds, which are often much better than you’d expect at their price point.)

Russia tried the “ooh we found a sanitary problem” trick one last time a few years ago.  It fell completely flat.  Putting aside that it was an obvious lie — if something is safe for the EU, believe me, it is safe for Russia — Moldovan wine exporters had now diversified their markets to the point that losing Russian sales was merely a nuisance.  In fact, the attempt backfired: it encouraged the Moldovans to shift their exports even further away from Russia and towards the EU.

So that’s the political story.  Russia had Moldova on a choke chain.  Over a dozen years or so, USAID patiently filed through that chain and broke Moldova loose.  Soft power in action.  It worked.

Nobody knows this story outside Moldova, of course. 

Okay, that’s the political story.  Here’s the personal one.

Some years ago, I moved with my family to a small country that was recovering from some very unpleasant history.  They’d been under a brutal ethnically-based dictatorship for a while, and then there was a war.  So, this was a poor country where many things didn’t work very well.

While we were there, my son suddenly fell ill.  Very ill.  Later we found out it was the very rapid onset of a severe bacterial infection.  At the time all we knew was that in an hour or two he went from fine to running a super high fever and being unable to stand up. Basically he just… fell over. 

Wham, emergency room.  They diagnosed him correctly, thank God, and gave correct treatment: massive and ongoing doses of antibiotics.  But he couldn’t move — he was desperately weak and barely conscious — and there was no question of taking him out of the country.  We had to put him in the local hospital for a week, on an IV drip, until he was strong enough to come home.

If you’ve ever been in a hospital in a poor, post-war country… yeah at this point someone makes a dumb joke about the NHS or something.  No.  We’re talking regular blackouts, the electricity just randomly switching off.  Rusting equipment, crumbling concrete, cracked windows.  A dozen beds crammed into a room that should hold four or five. Everything worn and patched and held together with baling wire and hope.   

We’re talking so poor that the hospital didn’t have basic supplies.  Like, you would go into town and buy the kid’s medication, and then you’d also buy syringes for injections — because the hospital didn’t have syringes — and then you’d come back and give those thing to the nurse so that your kid could get his medication. 

In the pediatric ward, they were packing the kids in two to a bed. Because they didn’t have a lot of rooms, and they didn’t have a lot of beds. And kids are small, yeah?  

But there we were.  So into the hospital he went.  Here’s a photo:

— Take a moment and zoom in there.  Red-white-and-blue sticker, there on the bed?  It says “USAID:  From The American People”.

Every hospital bed in that emergency room had been donated by USAID.  I believe they were purchased secondhand in the United States, where they were old and obsolete.  But in this country… well, they didn’t have enough beds, and the beds that they had were fifty years old.  Except for those USAID beds.  Those were (relatively) modern, light and adjustable but sturdy, and easily mobile.  The hospital staff were using them to move kids around, and they were getting a lot of mileage from them.

And of course, every USAID bed had that sticker on it.  And so did some other stuff.  There was an oxygen system that a sick toddler was breathing from.  USAID sticker.  Couple of child-sized wheelchairs.  USAID stickers.  Secondhand American stuff — USAID was under orders to Buy American whenever possible — but just making a huge, huge difference here.

As I said, it was crowded in there.  Lots of beds, lots of kids, lots of anxious parents.  So we got to talking with the other parents, as one does.  A couple of people had a little English.  And so my wife mentioned that we were here working on a USAID project…

…and god damn that place lit up like an old time juke box.  “USAID!”  “USAID!”  People were pointing at the stickers, smiling.  “USAID!”   “America, very good!”  “Thank you!”  “USA!  USA!”  “Thank you!”

This went on longer than most of us would find comfortable.  When it finally settled down… actually, it never really did entirely settle down.  For the whole time our son was there, we had people — parents, nurses, even the hospital janitor — smiling at us and saying “USAID!”  “Very good!”  “Thank you!”

I’m not prone to fits of patriotic fervor.  But I’m not going to lie: right then it felt good to be American.

Anyway, USAID stories.  I could go on at considerable length.  This is my career, after all!  I could tell more stories, or comment and gloss at greater length on these.

But this is long enough already.  More some other time, perhaps.