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Jihadsquad
Tuesday, August 16 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I had to return to the brick mansion this morning to revisit the chronic dripping refrigerator problem. This time I'd prepared two shallow wooden wedges to slide under 1L's refrigerator's front to conclusively tip it backwards, thereby helping force the door shut and encouraging internal condensation to go where it's supposed to. When I arrived, the woman who lives in 1L wasn't answering her door, so I let myself in, despite the fact that she's expressed a neurotic concern that her elderly Chihuahua (Jack) would bite me. She appeared soon thereafter from outside, and now it seemed her concern wasn't really about Jack's biting proclivities. Instead her concern seemed to be entirely that when I removed things from her refrigerator, I placed them on the floor. Suddenly it all became clear: the stuff about Jack was just a cover for some sort of obsessive-compulsive germ phobia. She apparently felt that once an item came in contact with the floor, it would need to be thoroughly scrubbed before it could be returned to the refrigerator. That actually makes a certain amount of sense, that is, if you really consider a tile floor to be crawling with bacteria. (I don't; I routinely eat things I've dropped on the floor.) Once the tenant was clear that I wouldn't be further contaminating her refrigerator, she barricaded Jack in the bathroom and headed off to work. I installed the wedges under the refrigerator's front wheels, which tipped it backwards several additional degrees. I then let Jack out, tinkered with an outdoor light, and headed off to the Tibetan Center's thrift store (I'd hit the Uptown Hannaford — "Ghettoford" — for provisions earlier). As I've said before, the Tibetan Center has the best toys, and today I got an Escape Robot Kit for $2. Unfortunately, though, I later discovered it was missing some important pieces, such as the logic board. I also got an under-desk keyboard rollout drawer (those things can be used for a lot more than keyboards).
In my remote workplace this afternoon, we had a long video teleconference during which we brainstormed a possible name for a new task management system, one perhaps to be used by the entire organization. We were joined for part of the teleconference by Ja, the head of HR. It was unusual for him to join one of our teleconferences, but evidently he likes to participate in such brainstorms. Unfortunately, though, he had a fondness for the corporate cliché "synergy." Eventually we came up with corporate-sounding name that combined a simple English word for groups of people with a Hellenic word for a plan. It was the best of a lot of really bad options. (Personally, I would've gone with "Jihadsquad.")
Later this evening, in chatting in Slack with Ca while watching the rest of The Lobster, I realized that the problem with spending a lot of time brainstorming about something like this is that it tends to marry a group to whatever the group eventually decides. It's a consequence of the sunk costs fallacy, the same phenomenon that keeps otherwise-intelligent people wiring money to self-proclaimed Nigerian princes. (In this case, time is the cost.) Ca, whose mother has problems with addiction, turned the conversation to addiction and recovery, and we decided recovery (and the failure thereof) is often a result of the sunk costs fallacy. Recovery is initially maintained because of the sunk costs of having been clean. But then, if there is some slip up, the whole period of having been clean is lost in a moment and the addict decides they might as well just be a drunk (or whatever), since there is now no time at all of having been clean. During the corse of all this, Ca kept posting different takes on a logo for the new new task management system using different fonts. I was in a punchy mood, so I replied with a few of my own, including one where I'd written its stiff corporate name on my belly in purple marker and taken a picture of it. "This one might be a little too ghetto," I cautioned. As a bonus, the seam from the long surgery scar on my belly made it look a little like it had been written on one of my butt cheeks.
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