So my mom worked as an educational consultant for HP (AKA translating Engineer into Normal Human) and part of her job was working with the overseas translators to make sure everything said approximately the same thing and that all the languages fit on the documentation. And that said documentation looked pretty enough for marketing. marketing would always get real pissy if there was leftover margin space at the end of the instructions, which is to say, One Guy Named Carl would get real pissy over ‘wasted space’ and because they happened to work in the same building, he’d always come bitch to my mother.
For like, an hour.
Eventually, Mom realized that while English, French and nearly all the other languages took up the same amount of space, German always took up 20% more space and Japanese about 20% less. If she included both languages at the end of any documentation, they’d fill up the margin space *perfectly*. So she just started including both languages, regardless of whether or not that documentation would be distributed to Germany or Japan, just so she could fill up the margin space and also Mrs. Yamada at the Kyoto office needed the extra hours.
Carl, who only sort of paid attention to his work, told her he was very pleased that there was no more “wasted paper” despite the fact that most of the documentation was about 20% longer now.
Eventually, all the other documentation coordination people noticed mom’s practice and started including German and Japanese, and started doing it too. Then the inclusion of both languages became Official Documentation. Then it became Standard Practice for HP and any firms it worked with. Then it became the Industry Standard across Silicon Valley. If you open up the user manual on a new computer these days, you’ll often find German and Japanese, right at the end, because it’s a semi-official practice now.
…some 20 years after my mom started this, my fiance got a high school German assignment to translate a piece of formal writing, and he chose the documentation for his new HP laptop. He had fun with that assignment, and it encouraged him to stay in German, eventually travel overseas, and when he met me, we had a lovely conversation in German and I decided he was worth going out with.
Thank you Mom, for finding a way around Carl’s bullshit, and me my husband.
I’m watching a livestream of President [Obama]’s ADA address in which he remembers his father-in-law, who had MS, and wonders what more he would have been able to achieve and experience in his life if he had
-been able to use a powerchair sooner
-not been hesitant to go places and do things due to his fear of getting in people’s way by being slow, or burdening his family members in certain situations
this is one of those nuances that nondisabled people, even if they broadly say all the right things, almost never get? Like, President Obama was reminiscing about how his father-in-law always went to events early so he could take his seat before everyone else came in, to avoid getting in their way – but he wasn’t saying this to like, show that as an example of how everyone should think/act about their disability – he was saying, this is a thought pattern that ultimately needlessly limited the life of a wonderful man. Essentially he was saying that ableism, internal and external, makes people’s lives smaller, and being accommodated makes people’s lives bigger, owning their disabilities and having pride makes people’s lives bigger.
so many people just say “look at the heroic lengths this person went to in order to get around the barriers imposed on them as a person with a disability. that is so inspirational.” and I was worried that’s where this speech was going but no, the message was “look at the lengths this person went to in order to get around these barriers. he never should have had to do that. Let’s make a world that doesn’t do this to people.”
billie joe armstrong is like…the definition of chaotic good. a prime example of this is the fact that one time at a green day concert this guy in the pit was harassing a young girl so billie stopped the show to help her. however, his way of doing so was to jump into the audience, dropkick the guy directly in the face, and then fight him in a crowd of screaming fans
This is missing the best part – when he saw the guy, he tried to be like “Dude, stop” and when the man didn’t stop pushing the girl around he screamed “Fine! You wanna fight? I’ll fucking fight you, then!” and leapt directly into the crowd
There’s a reason Green Day was my favourite band in high school, and Billie Joe Armstrong is it.
knitting in the dark 