A Collection Of Improbabe Happenstance @nonsense-and-puzzlement - Tumblr Blog

to any new people on here PLEASE for the love of god at least put on an icon or human-sounding bio before following anyone cause now i think half the people i blocked are fucking real

entryn17

god yeah sorry i probably should have clarified. for the new people: there’s been an influx of bots recently appearing alongside the growing userbase, so a lot of you might be hardblocked by someone if you follow them with a completely empty blog because they assumed there’s not a real person behind your account

#legit #if all you have is a picture and a bio #especially if the bio is like #Name 🍄 North Carolina ⛄️ 22 😈 other random crap 👠#im reporting and blocking #sight unseen

peachhyg0gh

not to be dramatic but i miss everyone and wish everything was different

animentality

fireleaptfromhousetohouse

quendergeer

if you think about it making your readers picture stuff in their heads is lk noncon and problematic

roscolux

need to beam this tweet directly into everyone's minds right now

skippyisntfunny

bisexual-engineer-girl

Pulitzer Prize type shit

wizardshark

Why's this dude built like crash bandicoot

spooky-narwhal

Everything about this damn post is so funny to me. The lighting of the arm from the flash. The posing of the arm like a dramatic death from a novella. The fact the photo somehow got taken still and looks this good. The subreddit name. The fact this guy really is built like crash bandicoot

adhduck

Does the “I’m gonna get a good grade in” person know the impact they’ve had. Do they know they did in fact got a good grade in post, something that’s both normal to want and possible to achieve,

cellobuster

They do know it and in fact if you want to support them you can buy a patch or sticker off their Etsy shop

horreurscopes

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

horreurscopes

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

lasrina

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

stephaniematurin

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

berkelbites

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

samueldays

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

doccyuk

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

moghedien

One like nitpick thing that drives me crazy is when people call Blue Whales the largest whales or the largest living mammals or some shit like that

Because yes that is true. But when you frame it like that you are completely disregarding the absolutely batshit reality that Blue Whales are the largest animals that have ever existed on earth through the entire history of the planet and they are alive right now today

teaboot

what annoys me about explaining evolution to people who don’t think it’s real is that everyone’s idea of how it works seems to be from this

Whereas the reality is far more like

teaboot

Was not expecting this many of you to resonate with Millennium Death Plinko

sufficientlylargen

One of these days the horse is gonna come out of pinko with opposable thumbs, and then we're all in trouble.

deathtokillian

Ideas are cooking for my pride outfit.

deathtokillian

Oh boy have I pissed off the transphobes with this one.

phoenixyfriend

Game show called "What's Wrong With You" where a bunch of doctors compete to see who can diagnose a mystery illness (chronically ill patient whose lab results keep coming back normal despite obvious symptoms) first and most accurately.

Pros:

Doctors paying off their medical loans with prize money

Chronically ill people getting free testing (MRIs, CAT scans, X-Rays, bloodwork, etc) and possibly a diagnosis

You can ding points for 'anxiety' and 'you just need to lose some weight'

Doctors are incentivized to find an answer, not just find something billable

Cons:

HIPAA

Wrong Diagnoses made because they were rushing

epicmusic42

HIPAA can be bypassed via agreement to air/be on the show. There'd need to be lawyers heavily involved with setting up the specifics of how the paperwork works, but its absolutely doable.

I don't knkw how to handle the issue of wrong diagnosis bc folks were rushing tho

phoenixyfriend

More lawyers prepping the young docs to avoid triggering malpractice suits, probably.

cazort

I want to watch this show.

How would it be judged though? The problem is it sometimes takes weeks to months to figure out whether or not a diagnosis is correct and/or a treatment is working,

roseapprentice

Do one of those long-haul reality show competitions where you come back months after the main filming to dramatically reveal the results.

Each doctor can order a limited number of tests. You win the most prize money if a test that you've ordered comes back positive for something that makes sense with the symptoms. (Additional checking is required for tests with a high rate of false positives.) Prize money is split if there are multiple winners.

If no one gets a positive test, there's a smaller prize for suggesting a treatment that the patient uses while measurably improving over the course of 3-6 months. And an even smaller fallback prize for subjective improvement.

Since the patient is not required to take the treatments the doctors suggest, there is an element of bedside manner in this aspect of the competition. If your patient trusts you enough to use the treatment you suggest, then you will have a shot at the fallback prize.

phoenixyfriend

Yeah, it would definitely be a very 'we filmed for months and the show compresses that into a weekly hour-long episode' kind of competition. My major references for that sort of thing are GBBO and Project Runway.

I think a fun element would be "if a chronically ill person with no degree can identify what's wrong with the patient before you do, they get a cash prize (you are still in charge of actually doing the tests that confirm or disprove it)." So if you spend six weeks doing genetic tests and X-rays but some MCAS girlie listened to a five-minute description of symptoms and went 'yeah, you've got [thing]' before you officially considered it, their chunk of the cash comes out of your winnings

And for everyone saying "this is just the House MD tournament arc"...

NGL I forgot that arc happened... but I was thinking "imagine that SNL sketch about the podcast-doctor-appointment, but it's a competition show about chronically ill mysteries, like House MD in real life, but someone put Sam Reich in charge (Katie Marovitch is there as his right-hand comedian and chronically-ill-herself host)."

phoenixyfriend

As I said in the other post where I mentioned dropout: they could NOT do this. The liability insurance would be insane. It would not be accessible to a production studio of that size. There are other things that make it unlikely for anyone, but also some things that make it unlikely for dropout specifically (liability insurance, the ability to award prize money that would actually make a difference to medical debt, the very structure of the company around actors/comedians rather than Random Real Life People).

HOWEVER

I can imagine a game changer episode where some contestants, probably youtuber guests like Dr. Mike or something, have to guess already-diagnosed chronic illnesses of audience volunteers.

No medical testing. Just 'describe some symptoms, and watch as the medical youtubers that are here for a day have to figure out what you've got.'

jerseymuppet

kissin kate barlow has the best villain origin story ever put to paper. if i fell in love with a sweet man who just wanted to sell onions and show of his sick carpentry skills and they killed him for being black i think i would also snap and kill everyone involved in the most ironic way possible.

the-stray-liger

Saw a video with a title that was like "why were victorians obsessed with death" and I am going to fucking set something on fire. Victorians weren't "obsessed" with dead or had a morbid disturbing deviant interest in it. MORTALITY WAS HUGE. Death of loved ones at young ages was a routine thing for them and they did all the memento mori things not to be creepy or shocking but out of grief for the ones they loved and lost. Victorian memento mori photographies or children weren't creepy bc the victorians were trying to do something twisted or deviant but because their babies died young and they wanted to have something to remember them by. Believe it or not people in the past also experienced love and grief and coped the best they could with it

jame7t

one of the lovely ladies I’ve been seeing got covid & she’s like “maybe you didn’t catch it?” Girl I was not a ‘didnt catch it’ amount of space away when we were- wheres that tweet about the vaxxed guy. you know the one

hafermensch

paper-wounds

Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

pyaarisms

just so you know 'jfc' (which you use in a lot of the tags on your posts) is an abbreviation for jesus fucking christ and you probably shouldnt use it if ur not a christian

I can't believe I read this with my own two eyes