The Vogon Poetry Of Voice Recognition Software

Our flight to London leaves tomorrow afternoon, which means that today has been spent, by and large, in a haze of Doing Things: wrapping gifts, packing bags, putting bikes in storage, sewing the ends into Toby’s new Dr Who scarf, doing tax, buying travel insurance, finalising the return of our bond, photocopying passports, purchasing books and so on. One might reasonably expect that this anticipatory bustle was the highlight – and, indeed, the be-all, end-all – of the day.

One would, however, be wrong.

In the course of stumbling upon my computer’s text-to-speech function and making it say swear words (which was a subset of recalibrating my cursor speed, which was a corollary of trying to fix my recalcitrant USB ports) , my loving husband discovered a similar facility in his own laptop: viz, its voice recognition software. Had this program been given a more specific nomenclature – such as word recognition or sentence construction software – I would be perfectly poised to denounce these labels as both false and misleading. However, after listening to almost two hours of a grown man patiently endeavouring to coax sense from a machine, I may safely vouch that the voice recognition software does, indeed, interpret his voice – albeit with a complete and utter lack of accuracy.

Fixing these many defects is an ongoing process: for one thing, the software seems categorically incapable of comprehending Toby’s pronunciation of the letter F, with humerous results, while attempts at associative spelling (C for Clive) have frequently devolved along the lines of P for Pisshead, F for Fuck, and S for Stupid. Nonetheless, he persists. Fifteen minutes alone were dedicated to teaching it the name Frege, which his laptop interpreted as ‘radio’ – an amusing misapprehension which Frege himself would have doubtless been well-placed to appreciate. With each sternly reiterated command (Go To End Of Document!), I find myself envisaging his computer as a disobedient puppy or head-tilting parrot. Bad software – go to your cage!

In which context, I am delighted to offer the following garbage – a word for word transcript of today’s efforts at voice recognition turned into existential poetry by judicious use of the space key (Toby’s doing). I can’t provide a comparative record of what was actually said to elicit such nonsense, but I can assure you that it in no way resembled what here follows. It’s my belief that his laptop has a secret penchant for Vogon poetry. I’ll let you judge for yourselves.

Vogon Voice Recognition Poetry

Gus that it is now a girl

from what you’re doing

what you listen to

what lined up

can’t say how your right mind dog

could revenge on his knees and at least try another

down missing so I cent gas

is now back

is no gas

there is now a girl

what you’re doing

what you listen to

what my now can’t say how

your right mind goal remains

them unused needs at least try another her and her are

How hotels urinal I give you

realise that your hotel one listening

usually listening to them

in writing things down

Maxwell’s quoted no

and what was that I can do little

but not mostly to what I’m saying

issue a real Secretary

are beginning very angry

that it can honestly start looking

at receiving the and the long-haul dark

or her who are already

some other blacks were not mostly

to what I’m saying usual real secretaries

bearing a finger again

reader can honestly start looking at receiving B

and a long haul are all looks a Milan

to have a better known by her

you are oracle is our way

and I for every year

you will rely on they are there is a

Up, you are knew what you’re talking about

his a limousine as growing very room,

and only three creating

I’ll walk towards more on her

who are all middle of his indulging

quite the here and there are other people on,

and already some other blacks were not mostly

to what I’m saying usual real job

has bearing asking you again readers are,

they start looking at receiving B

ally our phones and other nine

took them known by her

you want oracle is it,

why and I walked in reunion

will run like one day I’ll bet he is

the in up of I-the the who had.

Sexism of the Straw

When it comes to alcohol, there’s only two things I don’t drink: beer and sambucca. I’ll hack the sambucca if it’s part of a Harvey Wallbanger, but even so, not liking liquorice-flavoured spirits is hardly a handicap on your average trip to the pub. The same cannot be said of disliking beer. It’s a social drink. It goes well in rounds, most people drink it, you can share jugs, and it’s markedly cheaper than just about anything else. Nonetheless, I drink bourbon and coke (shut up), which at least has the advantage of being readily available. But since I’ve been old enough to drink in pubs, I’ve noticed my choice of beverage, apart from being, yes, boganly, brings an unintended consequence: the Sexism of the Straw.

Imagine this: a confident young woman in a ThinkGeek shirt approaches the bar and asks for a B & C. The bartender (male) takes in her appearance, the gaggle of unruly logicians with whom she has entered, grins, pours her drink, and puts a little black straw in it. Firmly but politely, the young woman removes the straw, wipes it on the inside rim of the glass, and lays it back on the barmat. Drink in hand, she returns to her table. The round goes on; the bourbon is consumed. Someone else – male, most certainly a philosopher of some description – saunters up and orders a jug plus same. When he returns, huzzah! – there is no straw. Perhaps, the young woman thinks, the bartender has learned. But she is wrong: for, lo, when next her round appears, the straw is back, protruding from her bourbon and coke like a tiny plastic javelin.

Now imagine this happens at every single bar, everywhere, ever. I cannot begin to describe how annoying this is. Firstly, who drinks bourbon and coke from a straw? For that matter, what adult drinks anything other than cocktails from a straw, alcoholic or otherwise? Secondly, why would chicks need straws more than guys? It’s not like our lips are weaker. It’s not even neater, or more girly-girly-feminine, because any possible element of girly-girly-feminine gained by the straw is instantly lost by the fact that it’s bourbon-and-fucking-coke. The highlight of this weirdness came tonight, not at the pub (for once) but a Chinese restaraut, where the (male) waiter brought my Long-Suffering Husband and I two glasses of water: one strawless, for him, and one with straw, for me. I mean, water. It’s not like there was even a slice of lemon there, or ice, you know, something to swizzle around: no. Just plain ol’ water. With a straw.

God help me.

There’s only two scenarios in which I’ve ever been served strawless: either the barman takes careful note of my straw-refusal and thereinafter learns (although usually they go to put the straw in a second time, catch my expression and whisk it out again, whoopsie!), or the bartender has been female.

O barmen of the world, take heed: renounce your ludicrous straws. If it’s absolutely necessary, put them within reach on the counter, supply on demand – who cares? But for the sake of everloving sense, stop giving them just to women.

It’s enough to make a girl start drinking beer.

What The..?

Someone has stolen our tree.

As in, uprooted it. Gone. Utterly. Since this morning.

A whole entire tree.

I do not get this.

When I left for work this morning, there was a slender, dead, but decidedly extant tree in our front garden, which is essentially a metre-wide, less-than-half-a-metre-deep patch of dirt between the fence and the door. It was not a big tree. It was very much deceased, but in a scenic, unthreatening way. Except for our house or the fence, there is nothing it could possibly have fallen on, nor was it heavy enough (being both exanimate and hollow) to damage anything it did fall on. Even had this happened, the tree would – one assumes – still be there. Slanted, perhaps, and decidedly less well-earthed, but nonetheless present.

This is not the case.

Instead, our tree is gone. Given that we returned home circa 1:45 AM after an evening out, this resulted in rather less alarm than might reasonably have been raised at any other time. But, still. There is no sign of the tree near our house or in the street. There is – and I cannot stress this enough – an exceedingly obvious hole where the tree once nestled. And that’s it. Zip. Nada. Nothing. No tree.

I am so weirded out right now.

I mean, suburban tree thieves? Who steals a dead tree with grey, rough bark, two meters tall, that’s thin enough to put both your hands around and have the fingers touch? A dendrophiliac with an anorexia fetish? The landlord, for inscrutable reasons of his own? Did the tree fall down,  only to be removed by a kindly neighbour/Samaritan before we got home? If so, why not leave a note to explain the absence? Are aliens abducting trees? Why our tree? Are there other victims? These are the obvious responses, none of which is especially, well, obvious. Because, seriously: who steals a dead fucking tree?

I’m going to invesitage this.

Unhelpful

I’ve been living in Melbourne a good two years now. I’ve made friends here, some of whom I see more than once a week, while I’ve lost contact (insofar as Facebook allows this to happen) with people back in Sydney. It happens – it’s life. We roll with the punches, grow and flourish as individual blossoms in the metaphoric Garden of Whatever, catch up where we can, move on when we can’t. It’s a healthy Goddam process.

So why are all the numbers in my mobile phone exactly the fucking same as they were five years ago?

I’m not even kidding. Tonight, I’m looking to call someone about the address of a party we’re heading to – we’ve been there before, but can’t remember the route – and what do I find? One releveant number. One. In two years.

It’s like being in the Matrix: I walk around, blythely assuming my ability to call anyone I know, only to take the red pill and discover that a full half of all my contacts are utter strangers. I mean, Colette? Who the hell’s she? Or Bren? Or Debbie? Or Emma? More importantly, why don’t I ever put in last names? Or, let’s go crazy, some form of useful identification, like ‘random chick I must’ve met at a college party, maybe she had brown hair and a weird laugh’? Because this is just ridiculous.

With the exception of about four numbers, the rest are work contacts for jobs I’ve long since left, friends from early highschool I see maybe once a year, and family: in short, numbers relevant only to my CV (where they’re recorded anyway), my life between the ages of 14 – 19, or which I know by heart.

Well, I’m taking a stand. Tonight, by gum, I’m going to do an overhaul. I’m going to find out the numbers of friends, and call them.

Eventually.

Sweet Sense Preserve Us

Lord have mercy – Sarah Palin is ready and willing to declare war on Russia. Newsflash, guys: the Iron Curtain has fallen. Whenever John McCain starts talking about communism and Eastern Europe, I start to hear flashes of Dr Strangelove: “Mr President, we cannot allow the development of a mineshaft gap!” Has satire taught us nothing? Earth to America: Dmitry Medvedev has seen the Big Board. The spies have come in from the cold and are sunning themselves in Cuba. No, wait, not spies – I’m thinking of enemy non-combatants unprotected by the Geneva Convention. They’re the ones in scenic Guantanamo. Cuba. Thingy. Damn!

Where was I?

Ah, yes, Sarah Palin and her delightful proclivity for warfare. Who knew: not only do the Republicans support a return to the moralism of the 1950’s, but they also hunger for Cold War politics! In cinemas, it could play as McCarthyism 2: The Hottening. Get it? Cold becomes hot. I just kill me (or, if I were Sarah Palin, lots of Russians). But while on the film theme, might I draw your attention to Kyle’s Mom, aka Sheila Brovlovsky, of South Park fame? Remember in the South Park Movie when Sheila declared war on potty mouths and Canada?

This is who I picture when Sarah Palin talks about war. Criminy: they even look alike. (Bonus: if the Republicans win, we can all have a rousing chorus of Cartman’s song.)

And who says life doesn’t imitate art?

Domesticity: Spring Cleaning

I cleaned under the bed today.

This was not a minor operation. As with deep-sea diving, it is imperative that you bring your own oxygen, bracing for the sight of weird creatures, lost cities, sunken ships and other such wonders as dwell in the great Beneath.

During today’s excursion/archeological survey, for instance, I discovered: eighteen novels, a My Little Pony colouring book, a carton of ancient School Magazines, four empty shoe boxes, five pens, dust bunnies beyond measure, no less than sixteen water bottles and a copy of Scouts In Bondage. For those of a sceptical demeanour, I include photographic evidence of these last two. Behold!

(It’s worth noting that Scouts In Bondage belongs to my husband. This is vastly less disturbing once you realise that the slim, brown volume in question actually contains pictures of unfortunately suggestive book titles from eras past, as opposed to, say, the kind of illicit photographic materials likely to result in divorce, arrest and custodial sentancing, in that order.)

Drinks, anyone?

Ivory Towers, And So Forth

The following is an abridged transcript of a conversation which took place earlier tonight in a dumpling house off Lonsdale Street, and is one consequence of drunken philosophers trying to discuss environmentalism. It went like this:

Toby: So, global warming. Why don’t we just move the planet? You know, figure the maths out –

Zach: I thought you hated metrics?

Toby: Shut up!

Dave: Move the planet! We could build rockets, push it along –

Ole: Yeah!

Me: But, I mean, isn’t Earth an M-type planet? Don’t we occupy –

Toby: “M-type” planet? What the hell? Isn’t that a Star Trek term?

Me: No, it’s a legitimate science term which just happens to get used in shows like Star Trek.

Toby: Right.

Me: Shut up! I’m serious. We occupy a small belt in space, right, because we’re just far enough away from the sun not to burn, but close enough not to freeze.

Ole: What, and what happens if we get too far away?

Me: We turn into Venus.

Dave: Venus is closer!

Me: Mars, then.

Zach: OK, fine, but we’re moving the planet. I mean, if we could make the year 500 days long, right, we could have ten day weeks, go decimal –

Toby: I thought you hated arithmetic?

Zach: Shut up! 

Dave: So global warming is solved.

Ole: But, hang on, if we move the planet, won’t the moon crash into us?

Dave: No, no! The moon’ll come with, won’t it? Right?

Zach: Well, either way, it’s still coming with us. It might just, you know, be part of us.

Toby: If it explodes, we could have two.

Zach: Right! So we blow up the moon first.

Ole: So it can’t crash into us!

Dave: Yes! This is the new plan, then. Step one: blow up the moon. Step two: move the planet.

Me: Moving the planet. They did that on Futurama once, with robots.

Ole: And everything on Futurama is automatically brilliant.

Toby: Isn’t that a documentary? I’m pretty sure it is.

Dave: They didn’t blow up the moon, though.

Zach: You know, those damn Jehova’s Witnesses, they keep on saying how great it would be if the moon were invisible, how it would solve all their problems, and I’m like, “Dude. But it’d still be there.” Unfortunately, though, they’ve got a huge voting constituency. Bastards.

Me: I guess they took that song It’s Only A Paper Moon a bit too literally.

Zach: Yeah.

And thus, we saved the world.

The Quality Of Humour Is Not Government

Or at least, some branches of government.

After less than a week of temporary employ, I was today fired from the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions. My sin: unprofessional conduct. How this came about is, in my opinion, faintly ludicrous, but here, for your enjoyment, is the full tale.

Near the end of my holiday, I was contacted by my temp agency about a potential job. They were not sure I would get it, as the position required an inteview and I was, at that exact moment, in a different state; nonetheless, after describing it as a general administrative position and right up my alley, they promised to do their best. The following day, I received a second phone call, informing me that the client, upon reading my CV, had declared me a suitable employee for the next two months. I would start work on Monday at 9 AM, and thus was the matter settled.

In fact, on the day itself, I arrived early. In due course, I was shown around, introduced, taught the rudiments of using an internal database and then, after approximately two hours, given a very large whack of photocopying indeed. For those unfamiliar with corporate or legal-grade photocopying, understand that it is no mere button-press, on-your-merry-way exercise. Instead, you are presented with a folder (or folders) the approximate thickness of two good-sized Bibles and told to go forth and multiply, which activity involves standing beside a very large, very loud machine for upwards of an hour and not doing anything else. In my case, the magic number of copies was 23, with a side-order of exquisitely time-consuming tricky bits. This project consumed the remaining five hours of Monday, all of Tuesday and just over half of Wednesday: roughly seventeen hours spent in a narrow hall beside a photocopier.

In order not to go insane during this time, I listened to my iPod (having first, as a matter of course, asked for and been granted permission to do so), read snatches of a book and toyed with assorted newspaper puzzles (the crossword, sudoku) rescued from beside a nearby recycling bin, none of which impeded the actual copying. Rather, with no other pending work, it made sense: I copied, collated, highlighted and filed as ordered, making the occasional wry remark as passing office-dwellers exclaimed over my large collection of paper and otherwise getting on with it. On finally completing this mammoth task, I was given more photocopying, such that the promised moniker of ‘general administration’ was beginning to sound a bit thin: five large folders, each to be copied five times. That took the rest of Wednesday and most of this – that is to say, Thursday – morning, whereupon, after a brief excursion to a nearby court (20 minutes, tops), I was given another file to copy.

Needless to say, I was not thrilled; but copy I did. Idly, while the pages printed, I wrote out two poems from memory onto pieces of paper – one anonymously attributed, one by e. e. cummings – and pinned them beside the machine, reasoning that, as I was spending a lot of time in its general vicinity, some friendly words might be nice. Job done, I returned to my desk, typed a letter (or rather, typed less than ten words into an existing document template), printed it and sat, waiting for my boss to return from wherever it was she’d gone. When she did return, it was with a smile and the news that, coincidentally, the head of HR wanted to see me. This was the man who’d welcomed and inducted me in on Monday. Off I went.

Inside his office, I sat down. Stern-faced, the head of HR lost no time in informing me that my supervisor was not happy with my performance and unprofessional behaviour. I had, he said, been chilling out to my iPod, clearly not focused on photocopying. During this time, I had also dared to put my feet up on the bench, a charge I did not deny, although able to see how this, at least, might have caused some contention. Furthermore, I had made disparaging remarks about photocopying, which caused me to blink a bit, given that:

(a) so had several other employees, usually in sympathy to my workload; and

(b) this is a psychologically healthy reaction to photocopying, especially if one is also laughing at the same time. (I was.)

He then drew two pieces of paper from a nearby pile and pushed them, with deliberate slowness, across the desk: the poems I’d put up.

‘Are you,’ he asked, ‘responsible for these?’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘ I wrote them up, yes, but I didn’t write them.’

‘You were seen,’ he said gravely – if somewhat redundantly, as I had just admitted as much – ‘putting these up.’

This behaviour, I was told, was unprofessional. My disdain for the position and the work it entailed were such that I was to be let go, immediately, before the end of the day, as they – being, one assumes, the HR manager and his immediate fellows – would much rather pay somone who was happy to be there, and incidentally, I needn’t come back to his office again. The actual quality and timeliness of my work was not discussed; pointedly so.

All of which gave the distinct impression that, from my CV, the head of HR had been expecting rather a different sort of person: pencil-skirted and sleek, perhaps, with an eye to bureaucratic formality, and not the sort of person to wear a leather jacket or ThinkGeek shirt.

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

Following this frank exchange of views (and trying, admittedly, very hard not to grin, and sometimes succeeding) I went back upstairs to locate my now-ex-boss. Smiling prettily, she agreed to sign my timesheet, laughed over our joint inability to add up my hours correctly, and in all aspects behaved as though she had not just dobbed me in for a dressing-down and firing. She said it had been a pleasure working with me, but this I found hard to believe, given her stern disapproval of my behaviour as recently expressed elsewhere.

In the doorway to her office, I stopped, hand on the frame, and looked her in the eye. I am quite able to endure being dressed-down for possessing corporate eccentricities, because the absurdity of it makes me grin inwardly; but I do not appreciate the jovial pretense that such has not happened – or rather, the smiling assertion of the velvet glove that the iron hand is nothing to do with them. It is for this reason that, rather than walking straight out, I smiled in turn and related the following (truthful) anecdote, which I will approximate here:

When my father was fresh out of school – and this is a while ago, because my father is in his seventies – he took a job at a bank, as was done back then. In his spare time, he wrote odd limmericks on some of the bank notepads. Nothing rude; just poems. Passing the time. And one day, the bank manager – you can imagine, a large, older, balding man, run to fat – called him into his office, demanding to know why my father was writing obscenities on bank property. And standing there, my father decided – not out loud, but in the privacy of his thoughts – that anyone who would call a limmerick obscene simply for being a limmerick was a humourless person not worth working for. And very soon after, he quit, and found happiness elsewhere.

I finished by saying that I, apparently, was following in his footsteps, except for the bit about choosing to leave. My now-ex-boss smiled her same, pretty smile, except perhaps it was a bit tigher this time, and said ‘Really?’ in what, under different circumstances, might have passed for a genuinely curious tone of voice.

‘Really,’ I said.

And then, without further ado, I went back to my desk, packed up my bag, put on my coat and left.

And that, as they say, was that.

In Other News

In what is probably my favourite headline ever, an environmental protestor has glued himself to the British Prime Minister.

Take a moment to process that.

Gordon Brown, despite the startlement this must have initially caused, managed to see the humour in the situation and laugh, so good on him. There could be an article all by itself explaining the train of thought which lead Dan Glass to think up this cunning plan – my imagined version involves alcohol, a rogue swan, bad kebabs, at least two strippers and John Cleese, but that could just be the crazy talking.

In real life, it was probably Michael Palin.

Jargonesque

Language, it seems, is fickle – or at least, her masters are. Here in the corporate world, an entire new subspecies of wordage has crept, deformed and malignant, into the common parlance: action has become a verb; blue sky thinking has replaced optimism; gamebreaking has replaced ground-breaking, despite the fact that their usage is identical; and the instruction to get across something no longer implies a physical manoeuvre. In highschool, I witnessed a similar phenomenon: knowledge outcomes, learning objectives and – shudder – juxtapositioning came to glisten with a slick, unholy patina from their over-use, misuse and general degradation at the hands of the NSW Board of Studies, so that by the time I entered University, I’d developed a healthy mistrust of official documents.

But jargon, as a concept, is hardly new: bright lads that they are, the world-wide amalgam of medical practitioners cottoned on centuries ago, when some wry descendent of Hippocrates worked out that you could have a different Latin name for each of twenty-six bones in the human foot, and if that name was made up of two words, well! – so much the better. Tradesmen have their own inventive dialouge, as do lawyers, gardeners, soldiers, engineers, computer scientists, regular scientists, mathemeticians, philosophers, psychologists and a wealth of other professionals. For all we might resent being told we have an Oedipus Complex or a ruptured laetissimus dorsi, we don’t object to this type of jargon so much as grumble at the need to have it explained. It would be hard to write a book lamenting that doctors and lawyers are largely unintelligible; but Don Watson has made a pretty penny lambasting the corporate, educational and political spheres for being just that.

And then there is slang. Words like hot and cool, despite being diametric opposites, have come to mean exactly the same thing; but no-one objects. Fluctuating with creative glee, cultural terms like bunnyboiler, whale-tail and muffin-top are happy cornerstones of multi-generational slang, while most families have at least one or two clan-specific terms that are either entirely made up or less widely used elsewhere. My own eccentric kin are particularly good at this: to use a few examples, dub means toilet; tataise indicates a pleasant drive with no planned destination; sneety describes any sleek, pointy, long-nosed dog, such as a Jack Russell, but can also refer to cars, pens and, occasionally, mobile phones; erfs are eggs; a Horace Horse-Collar is any loutish, genially ignorant male youth; turkeys are fools; nadger describes any visible skin complaint; old gougers are old men; and rendezvous is pronounced phoenetically – ren-dez-vus – ever since I tried it out that way at age seven, with hilarious results.

So what’s the difference?

Ultimately, it boils down to our base affection for language. We have no innate objection creating new terms for old concepts, provided we can take pleasure in the task, bending words in clever, funny, outrageous, inventive, ironic or downright incendiary ways. Popular usage filters out terms that don’t quite work, or provides other options where people disagree. Corporate jargon, on the other hand, is largely redundant, taking the place of other terms while being less fun to use. Language is bullied into new forms through a process devoid of creativity; quite often, it results from sheer ignorance as to how the words in question were originally meant to work. Corporate heirachy and protocol then force them into common usage with none of the usual social safeties, such as mocking terms we think are silly, correcting those which are foolish, or altering those with potential. True, this process doesn’t apply to medical or legal jargon, but that’s because those terms aren’t taking the place of anything more natural: they are specific and ultimate, surgical tools for delicate work.

For most people, being forced to use corporate jargon is a kind of cruel and unusual punishment. Imagine going to work one morning to discover that, overnight, your office has adopted a new policy on slang. Funderful has replaced good; jivin’ has replaced cool; and there are lots of fifty year-old white men attempting to call one another bro. The pain of this scenario is utter. My God, you would think, backing slowly towards the door. It’s all so…so…lame.

And you’d be right. For those of my readers who are no longer between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, remember the hideous embarassment you felt whenever a resident adult tried – oh, how they tried – to be hip, latching onto a word or phrase that had either gone out a decade ago or which, because they didn’t appreciate it was only cool when spoken by someone not trying to be cool, made you cringe with horror and check that they hadn’t been overheard, even in your own house. This is the reality of corporate jargon: a bitter combination of middle managers trying with zero success to be funky, idiots on all levels mangling tense, and enough yes-men to perpetuate the crime throughout all departments – yea, throughout the whole company and, verily, even the competition – until we are all ready to implode at the mere thought of human synergistics.

Bunch of turkeys and Horace Horse-Collars, all. Given my druthers, I’d send them home – Jason the Dog – with their hair aflunters.