Things people do that make no sense

[murlough23]

thing that I do that possibly doesn't make sense to others but makes sense to me because I don't enjoy them anyway: avoiding eating establishments, especially sit-down restaurants. -_-

You never go out? Wow.

[NewDimension]

(I'm not normally germophobic or anything like that, so I'm not sure why I have such an aversion to drinking straight from the glass. And I don't drink from a straw at home, so I'm not entirely sure why I do this. But I do. So I guess that's pretty much on-topic for this thread.)

When I'm at a restaurant, I usually like to use a straw also. Have you ever noticed how some of the waiters/waitresses hold glasses? They'll pick up the glass from the very top, where you would normally drink from if you drank out of the glass without a straw. So everytime you take a drink your lips with make contact with the germs that were on that person's fingers, and who knows where that person's fingers have been last. I'd much rather drink from a sanitized straw than drink from the edge of a glass that's been contaminated by someone else's germs. 

I'm normally not germaphobic either, but I can't say that I'd want to drink from a glass that's been contaminated in the aforementioned way. If a waiter/waitress holds a glass in such a way, sometimes my parents will tell them how unsanitary it is and ask them for a clean glass / new drink.

It doesn't make much sense why someone would hold a glass in such a way unless it was their own drink; especially if the waiter/waitress doesn't have their hands filled with anything else at the time they serve you the drink.

[Vlad!]

thing that I do that possibly doesn't make sense to others but makes sense to me because I don't enjoy them anyway: avoiding eating establishments, especially sit-down restaurants. -_-

That's interesting. I generally avoid chain restaurants (with the exception of Tossed and IHOP, because I love them so very very much), but there's a lot of great local eating establishments in this area that I enjoy a lot. It's also a great way to hang out with friends, since you were presumably going to eat dinner anyway. You can hang out and catch up and chat and then still have the before- and after- dinner times to do as you please.

That said, I'm sure staying at home and making your own food is better for the budget and the culinary expertise, so do what works (not that you needed my permission ).

[Vlad!]

Raymond Chen wrote a weblog post on some restaurant customs, and the last paragraph ("Bonus restaurant tip") talks about bringing the check, and regional differences thereof.

Also, at most of the places I eat the server will hold the glass at the bottom, the way it should be.

[enemy anemone]

at most of the places I eat the server

VLAD! EATS SERVERS. GOOD TO KNOW.

[murlough23]

Ha ha. That double meaning of "server" reminds me of a time I was eating at a sushi restaurant and the poor waitress slipped on something on her way to the kitchen and hit the floor with much cacophonous fanfare. Once I could see she was OK and therefore it was OK to joke about it, I said to my companions - "This is just like my job - I hate it when the server goes down."

Speaking of stuff going down, in preparation for moving into a new apartment today, I called up our ISP the other day and asked them to transfer my service on Saturday, May 8. They somehow took this down as a stop service on 5/6 and a start service on 5/8 (likely a typo or write-o on the phone lackey's part), so we discovered the hard way on Thursday night that we had no Internet. Upon calling them, they said that service could not be immediately restarted once stopped. Nobody could account for the error, so I promptly got transferred to their accounting department and said bye-bye to their services forever because THIS. MADE. NO. SENSE.

[murlough23]

It makes no sense to me that people don't realize the obvious when creating catchy acronyms for names that people would otherwise not remember. As an example, our company recently set up a new wireless network for visitors to our facility. They named it the Visitor Access Gateway, and proceeded to circulate a bunch of documentation explaining how to get in through the VAG. Thus far I think nobody has made smart remarks about it because nobody wants to run the risk of having to explain their smart remarks to someone who was previously innocent.

[Vlad!]

I dunno; I think at some point you have to just name it something that makes sense and trust people to be mature about it.

I mean, we won't be, but trying to keep ahead of slang and profanity is a fool's game.

[murlough23]

I dunno; I think at some point you have to just name it something that makes sense and trust people to be mature about it.

I mean, we won't be, but trying to keep ahead of slang and profanity is a fool's game.

Funny, and true, but in this case we're talking about the first three, easily identifiable letters of an appropriate anatomical name for something. Though I guess calling it a "vag" is a more recent slang thing. But still. Would "Visitor Internet Gateway" or "Visitor Access Portal" or "Visitor Access Network" have killed them?

There's also our company's Flight Operations group, logically named Raytheon Flight Operations, but not-so-logically abbreviated to (I kid you not) RayFlops.

[bloop]

Guidance abbreviated the wrong word in the computer for a course I'm teaching, "Algebra, Functions, and Data Anal".  Great!

[murlough23]

Guidance abbreviated the wrong word in the computer for a course I'm teaching, "Algebra, Functions, and Data Anal".  Great!

Analysis can be quite anal, from what my fellow math majors told me.

Also amusing in this category: Stores that put out want ads for an "Ass. Man."

[murlough23]

I don't get bumper stickers and license plate holders that show somebody's fandom of a certain team, business, or whatever by saying "Follow me to..." a  particular place. One example that I noticed today said "Follow me to Dodger Stadium". Well, most likely, the driver isn't currently en route to Dodger Stadium. So, unless you want me to follow you home, hang out until it's baseball season, and then caravan with you to Dodger Stadium, this seems like a rather corny way of indicating your fandom.

[Vlad!]

We have talked multiple times about the inanity of the statement "I could care less".

Well, David Mitchell decided to hold forth on the subject.

(His side rant about plow vs. plough and herb vs. herb reminds me of an Eddie Izzard bit)

[murlough23]

Why do people say "It is what it is?" On the surface, this is a tautology. A thing never is what it isn't. You're not giving me any helpful information here. I get that the general intent is that the thing being assessed is exactly what it appears to be, no need to prolong the conversation by overanalyzing it. It's a way of expressing ambivalence - I'm not seething with rage about it, but I'm not jumping for joy about it either, so let's just not waste our time on it.

Hmmm, I suppose I just made sense of a thing that doesn't make sense to me. But there must be less inane ways of expressing this sentiment. Such as, Whatever.

[enemy anemone]

"it is what it is" is what it is. =\

[murlough23]

Is not!!!

[enemy anemone]

"it is what it is" is what it is not!

[murlough23]

Is too!!!!!

[enemy anemone]

contrariwise!
"if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. that's logic!"

[Vlad!]

Que sera, sera.

[enemy anemone]

I more or less could and/or could not care less! or more!

[Vlad!]

It must be nice to live in the magical fantasy world that managers live in where you can handwave objections away with the power of words.

Manager: We are going to stop doing X.
Me: That could cause Y, which you said earlier is something you don't want.
Manager: Yes. We absolutely can't allow Y to occur.
Me: So we're going to continue doing X?
Manager: We'll stop doing X, but we need to make sure that Y doesn't happen.
Me: We started doing X specifically to prevent Y from happening. Are you saying that we were wrong to do X?
Manager: No, doing X was a good idea, but now that we're not doing X anymore we have to make sure that Y doesn't happen.
Me: *sigh*

[enemy anemone]

find a non-X solution so Y doesn't happen, plzthxbye.

[Vlad!]

But I liked X

[enemy anemone]

[murlough23]

[murlough23]

Little thing that makes no sense: When people say they logged on to a website, but really mean they just visited it. You logged on to the Internet, I guess. But unless you supplied a username and password or some other identifying credentials without which access would not be allowed, you did not log on to the actual website.

Big thing that makes no sense: Celebrating your city's team winning a championship by DESTROYING YOUR CITY.

[enemy anemone]

I think I've fussed about it here before, but I've been seeing it a lot lately--people will sign up for an account at twitter or facebook and say "I have a twitter" or "I have two facebooks". if this is not incorrect, it should be.

[Vlad!]

I think this is the same fundamental failure of expression as the one which leads people to say "I posted them to my facebook" (previous rant).

[Vlad!]

For some reason the cleaning staff here dusts our monitors, which generally causes annoyance (especially for those of us who have multiple monitors and have to spend five minutes every Monday morning getting them arranged just so after they're moved around by the cleaning staff).

What annoys/amuses me the most is that I have a plush bee sitting on my rightmost monitor, and the bee is always meticulously placed...but the monitors themselves might be in complete disarray.

(Why do I have a stuffed bee? One of my co-workers brought in some toys that his toddler outgrew, on the theory that if there's any demographic which will appreciate toys his six-year-old kid is too old for, it would be computer programmers. I used to put the bee on my head and my co-workers would shoot Nerf darts at it, but trying to balance the bee got too distracting so I put it on my monitor instead.)

[Vlad!]

In the category of "a thing I do that I thought made no sense until I found out that it actually does":

I have one friend who I talk with over IM a lot. I IM with other friends too, but they're local so I tend to talk in person or on the phone more. This friend lives further away, and for some reason we IM rather than email most of the time.

Whenever we're done talking, we always say "later". The conversation is not over until both parties have said "later". I always thought this was kind of lame.

But then another friend got on the IM bandwagon, and I've noticed that trying to end a conversation is super awkward, because we have no convention about when the conversation is in fact over. Now that I've noticed that, I've also observed that most of my IM conversations have tended to trail off into nothingness rather than having a definite endpoint. Thus, I've come to appreciate the definitive "Later" that ends it all.

[murlough23]

Vlad!, you just illustrated why I hate using IM. There's always that uneasiness over whether the conversation is understood to be over or whether the person's just busy, or ignoring you. This is why I prefer Email, message boards, Facebook, etc. for such conversation, as you can respond whenever you have time and a conversation naturally dies out without needing to be formally acknowledged as such.

I have one friend who contacts me exclusively over Google Chat (which I generally only keep on - with "busy" status almost all the time - so that my wife will know when I've logged off and left the office since I don't do it at the same time every night), and while I like talking to people occasionally who contact me via that method, it gets tedious when something spontaneous that most folks would usually just send in a one-line Email or share on Facebook or whatever now turns into a conversation that I have to figure out how to end. It's not that I don't want to talk to her - our conversations are usually interesting when there's an actual conversation to be had - but I feel weird figuring out how to get the faux-conversation over with when, if it had been posted to a website somewhere, I'd simply say something like "Neat." and move on.

[Vlad!]

For posterity:

I moved this topic on "too much time on his/her hands" and this topic on moving sidewalks and escalators into their own threads.

[Vlad!]

For some reason I keep typing "in tern" instead of "in turn". I guess it's because I help interview interns. Or maybe I'm saying that my statement only applies when inside a Tern.

[murlough23]

For some reason I keep typing "in tern" instead of "in turn". I guess it's because I help interview interns. Or maybe I'm saying that my statement only applies when inside a Tern.

You're probably subconsciously trying to spell "Internet".

[Vlad!]

I write "intarwebs" or "ubertron" or "intertubes" more than "internet", sadly.

[bloop]

Arguing about whether or not things are ironic:  http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony

[murlough23]

Arguing about whether or not things are ironic:  http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony

I had friends that argued about this in college, back when the song was a big hit. "That's not ironic; it's just depressing". Though I'd say that the dude getting over his fear of flying only for the first plane he ever boards to come crashing down is definitely ironic.

Also, if the song "Ironic" were not ironic in any way, that in and of itself would be ironic.

But hey, if you want to make "Ironic" less depressing, let's imagine how the Black Eyed Peas might cover it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxI3-HjOkgM

[Vlad!]

Arguing over shades of meaning which have no one canonical answer is really what the Internet is all about.

[murlough23]

Arguing over shades of meaning which have no one canonical answer is really what the Internet is all about.

No, it's not. I keep telling you, it's all about porn.