Marsalka @marsalka - Tumblr Blog

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trxy-land

Work pro tip 📢📢

I will have this as a print at SMASH next week!

milkooze-deactivated20260329

cipheramnesia

Working with different business cultures all over the globe, my biggest surprise is that while the USA is bad, it's not actually the very absolute worst I've ever worked with.

cipheramnesia

I can imagine all the guesses, but if you haven't talked with a crap ton of people from dozens of countries, it's not obvious.

cipheramnesia

The key is business culture is like its own weird separate culture with rules and structures, but most places have a fairly comprehensible set of expectations. So most of the time, it's just remembering perceived differences in expectations. Some places it's polite to be what feels really overly friendly to me. Some places it's polite to be what feels obsequious and formal to me. It's like, whatever. A secondary form of language kinda. It's not even social cues, it's just mechanics of language really. Places with that stuff, those are all fine and wonderful to deal with because there's a framework to communicate and all that.

Part of why the USA shits the bed trying to talk with is because every business person here has like zero framework, it's all lies and bullshit, and everyone wants to be the smartest bestest boy. It's not business culture as much as daycare for toddlers who have millions of dollars and hate human rights. Not the worst though, not by far.

cipheramnesia

What's key to understand is this is all separate from things like the real people in different places. Business brain people don't have any relevance to real human behavior, it's this whole other structure of make believe which controls everyone's well being. It's important to know because I know how to email a business guy in South Korea using language that will feel appropriate enough after translation, but that's completely irrelevant to the real people living there. It's easy to talk to business guys in China or India or whatever. Germany, Nigeria, Mexico.

UK business guys are pretty bad too. Still not the worst but you have to put a lot of extra work in because business culture in the UK still thinks the Brittish empire exists. The majority of business dudes in the UK see no difference between selling something that has their company name on it, and making it themselves. It's like how all the stuff that says "made in the USA" is 99% made somewhere else, and then one staple is put into it and it's made in the USA, but if you talk to business guys here, they never confuse where things are made, just like... more basic realities like linear time and physics. UK guys go the opposite way, and always say they own everything. But that's all relatively navigable. It's like, okay, you all live in an imaginary world, but I can still get everyone to understand time and logistics and stuff enough to get everyone understanding the same information. I can translate imagination land to reality and back, they get it.

cipheramnesia

Australia business guys are the worst. Uncontested. I keep minutely detailed notes on every interaction I have with any business brained Australian. I don't want to do this. I have to. Working with business guys in Australia is like being stuck in a marriage with an emotionally abusice pickup artist. Their favorite way to communicate is using work appropriate language to imply you're stupid and your work is worthless. Luckily, there's also no way to explain what you do, because I think when you get a corporate executive level position in an Australian business, they surgically remove the part of your brain that takes in new information.

My average verbal or email exchange with an Australian business guy goes something like this:

"Okay, this is going to take around a month. We need so and so dollars to start. Also, the Earth orbits the Sun."

"Great, just to confirm, we're ready to deliver tomorrow, and the giant hamster rolls the sunball across the sky. Sounds good, have you started?"

It's infuriating in some ways, fascinating in others. Information simply vanishes into an Australian business person as if you hurled it into space, but something in space might theoretically end up somewhere and everything I say to Australian business guys doesn't. I've tried every way around it, and nothing works. And they become enraged when the things they imagined, which no one ever actually said, don't happen. Like you know those clips from Alex Jones in court being read his own words? Imagine that instead of blustering denial he demanded to know how the lawyer was so incompetent at lawyering because words don't exist and he was told this was a carnival cruise not lawsuit. And they have both of the worst traits of USA and UK business guys on top of all that. And I've never heard anyone even close to the same level of casual racism as business guys in Australia. I mean, business guys as a rules aren't great people, but nowhere I've ever worked with has been so consistently terrible to deal with. It would be one thing if it was an outlier, I've had one or two USA companies that were rough, sometimes companies in South Korea can be a real pain, navigating business culture in France if you're from the USA is a labyrinth. But Australia. Those business guys are on another level. Every other company with dodgy practices knows what they’re doing that's questionable. I don't know if business guys in Australia have the ability to understand... like... language. Do they understand laws, money, logistics, anything? Impossible to say! They walk and talk like people but they have discovered some means by which they never intake any information ever. It's like plausible deniability evolved into a new part of the brain specifically to make it easier to be as unethical as the manifest physical reality permits. The regular people in Australia all seem fine, just more people, but the business operators are like night and day. I can find ways to communicate with non-English speakers fairly well, knowing how to work language to adapt to translation is fun. I can't make fucking heads or tails of English speaking Australian corporate execs. If you speak any second language, any at all, know that you are doing better at it than these guys are in their first one. It's literally impossible to overstate how uniformly unpleasant it is to work with business guys from Australia. They are, without question, the worst.

elodieunderglass

@cipheramnesia have you ever seen these?

ymfingsteadilyon

@elodieunderglass Those look really interesting, do you have a link to a sharper version? (Or is there a joke about communication difficulties and you're not supposed to see what it says?)

elodieunderglass

Ha, yeah, I hadn’t expected Tumblr to compress it like that - “do you love the colour of business communication around the world?”

The body of work is called “Communication Patterns Around the World,” by Richard Lewis. The main book they’re from is at the bottom of the image, but they’re widely spread. Googling will lead to many articles and many images.

littlebirdinagarden

The problem with having Crafting Brain Rot is that I see something I want that’s just a little too expensive and I start thinking ‘what if I made it instead?’ and then I start shopping for leather and leather-working tools which is just as much if not more expensive than the thing I wanted in the first place

littlebirdinagarden

Ok I looked up a tutorial and I probably don’t need as many tools as I thought, I have stuff already that apparently will do the job. So I only need leather, eyelets, an eyelet tool, and the elastic cord. Which comes to about £10 cheaper than the nice professionally made one I was looking at.

littlebirdinagarden

Alright I have been convinced both by everyone here encouraging me and also by the shop sending me a £5 off. I also managed to find the exact same leather that the original journal I was considering is made from and it was cheaper than the leather I had first put in my cart. So I spent a total of about £40 vs the £58 that the journal was

juney-blues

stairs are so funny. falling 100 meters will kill you. solution? fall 10 centimeters a thousand times.

markadoo

they invented all those neat si prefixes and people still talk like this

395nm

falling a hectometer will kill you. solution? fall a decimeter a kilotime.

enki2

afeelgoodblog

Aaaaw 🥹😍

pmamtraveller

Fishpond Mosaic designed by artist Gary Drostle

1968bullittmustang

@copperbadge I feel like this is something you would appreciate.

copperbadge

Oh, that is lovely. And I always appreciate an artist attribution too!

dduane

Here's the artist's website.

He's been doing mosaics like this for a while. (I followed up on the one in the top illustration some while ago, when I first ran into it online. I think I remember discovering that the town in Surrey where it originally appeared has removed it: no idea why.)

foxes-in-love

wizardarchetypes

never thought this day would come but i’m currently having a customer service experience so bad right now that i’m defecting from the employee regiment and joining the customers in their next battle. i don’t know who i am anymore.

wizardarchetypes

experience that makes me research local customer service supervisors for a global corporation and tag them in a LinkedIn post, to fall upon their mercy.

wizardarchetypes

long story short i have worked for a call center in customer service before and i knew something was not working out. i've had to call about this issue 5 times in 4 weeks because it's still not resolved, and each time the conversation has ended i've asked for an email confirmation of our conversation and a ticket number so i can call back and reference it with a new representative.

well every time i've called, the new representative has been like "i'm so sorry, but there's no ticket by that number. i have no record of you ever calling about this. i'll start a ticket for you."

finally, the fifth time i nearly burst into tears of frustration and i said "i don't want you to start a ticket for me, because it will be the sixth ticket created for this same issue. every week, one of your colleagues tells me they'll create a a new ticket for me, and then nothing happens."

they said, "i'm sorry but i have no record of those tickets existing." and i was like i KNOW. but they doooooo what is happening.

finally i got transferred to a supervisor's supervisor.

if you've ever worked in online customer service, you know that when a customer calls with a problem, you create a "ticket" that puts that issue into the system. if you can't resolve it, it goes into a ticket queue, where other people with the ability to resolve it select it, put it into their personal working queue, and resolve it.

well after 30 minutes of searching, this supervisor tells me, dumbfounded, that she's discovered a completely unique queue she's never seen before, where my tickets have been going somehow. a pocket universe queue that no one has access to or can edit or select from, not even her. she has no idea what's happening. she's like "yes, here are all your tickets, and no one can open them or comment on them or resolve them.....this is crazy......" and it's JUST my tickets in there. no one else's. of tens of thousands of customers.

all professionalism fell by the wayside. i told her i've worked with those queues before and also found that totally wild. she was like "what the hell is going on...." and talked me through everything she was seeing and how gobsmacked she was. we were both like "this is one for the books truly"

tells me she's going to have to bring this up above herself because this is a really big error on like, a coding level, that she has no idea how to resolve. tells me she will personally call me back tomorrow to update me.

four days pass with no word.

i call customer service again. random agent. explain the entire situation, including that last bit.

agent says "i'm sorry but i have no record of those tickets existing. i'll have to start a ticket for you. rest assured, it will be resolved."

i said, "no it won't be. it never will be. because they're in the special queue."

clearly not believing me, they said, "i've heard nothing about that. i'll start a new ticket for you."

srlgemstone

The party of colors - Tube & Eye Agate

nerdreamer

redrosesinblue

mademoiseli

The notes are broken. This is what tumblr is all about apparently.

atonau

THE NOTES ARE BROKEN! This has been reblogged so many times, Tumblr just shrugged and said “infinity”

theoldness

w-r-o-u-g-h-t

this “bon appetit” meme has turned into some sort of bizarre telephone game where each incarnation sounds more and more different than the original. in what way does “bon appetit” sound like “osteoporosis”