Ask Lemmy

I work in live production, and have actually encountered the Brown M&M’s clause in real life. It was a small 5 person band. We had the show’s producer sitting backstage, picking brown M&M’s out of the fishbowl for probably 45 minutes.

They showed up for sound check, and immediately went “holy shit you guys actually pulled out the brown ones? We added that as a joke!” The producer was in earshot, and I got to watch him take psychic damage in realtime.

Part of my job (fibre project engineer) is to oversee the building of fibre optic spine cables. Think of an 864 fibre cable snaking it's way through town with various drop off nodes for local access networks to be built.

I also oversee the termination of the cable in the exchange, and the testing of the spine to make sure it's within loss limits and that the right fibres are going to the right nodes.

I will often put a minor fault on in the exchange to see if the guys doing the testing pick up on the issue and report it back to me. Maybe a slightly dislodged connector, or fibre 275 crossed with fibre 276, for example.

Most of the time, the guys doing the testing will pickup on the issue and resolve it report it back to me. If it doesn't get picked up on, I'll make sure I keep a closer eye on the build crew.

This is gonna be controversial.

When I find out someone is a Christian, I ask them about their favourite part of the sermon on the mount. If they don't know it, they're 'cultural Christians' who've never opened a bible. If they're familiar with the sermon, it means they do the work. The sermon on the mount is the section of the bible where Jesus explained to people what values they should hold and how they should behave in order to call themselves his followers.

I'm an ex-Christian and so are a lot of people who just don't know it yet.

I need VIM mode on my text editor.

I need a towel hanging from the door of the oven or nothing is being done correctly.

In a former job, I developed "software" (I clicked together some LabVIEW...) for custom designed scientific experiments, which many other researchers (mostly PhD students) would use. Wrote detailed SOPs for their usage, because everything was wonky and in constant evolution, and in some circumstances, data generated could be wrong. So I put a toggle switch with some cryptic acronym on the panel which was told to be flipped in the SOP when users reached the part where following instructions was really critical. The toggle switch did nothing but to log time and date and what user was logged in. When discussing weird data later on, first thing I did was to check whether that log existed, and if not heavily scrutinized the data with respect to errors that could be induced by not following the SOP.

Turtle.

My 11th grade English teacher would hand back essay assignments with grades at the top and no markings throughout. I tended to get high but not perfect grades, but the impetuousness of youth got the better of me. In my next essay, which I wrote normally, I wrote the word "turtle" in the middle of a sentence somewhere in the middle of each main body paragraph. Just somewhere in the middle of a sentence I turtle copy pasted the word "turtle."

That paper made a 94. There was no mention of it. I'm pretty sure she just graded on who she liked and I wasn't a problem.

I don't have photos of myself on the internet and do not participate in group photos. If I see a photo of myself online I know, for a fact, that the person who posted it does not respect my privacy, therefore they do not respect me. I will not trust them with any information about myself and others and in general will cut them out of my life if at all possible. Because of this I don't have people who violate boundaries they don't share, so if I said "Actually, I think I may be a woman" or "I have been thinking about leaving the country" they would not immediately judge or try to prevent my doing so, they would let me be and respect my needs. Also because of this I am much more comfortable working on things with these people to make life better and to invest in their wellbeing.

When I first heard about the brown M&M thing, I thought it was just celebrities being petty, or maybe a joke. Years later, when I heard Roth’s explanation, I thought it was absolute genius.

When it's time for my car to get an oil change I make sure my windshield fluid is empty. It's a full service oil change and they claim they check ALL fluids. If it's still empty I question how good or a job they've done and what else they skip

The first thing that came to my mind was car repair.

This one wasn't one purpose. I went to a shop for an oil change and 10,000 point inspection or whatever they called it. I knew one of my headlight bulbs went out a week before, but when I got the inspection report, it said everything was fine. I went to the shop manager and asked him to confirm that the mechanic had checked everything on the report. I didn't blame him for the oversight, but he was kind of a dick when I pointed it out and had him do everything again until they found the problem.

Also, my dad always wrote the date on his air filters when he put them in because mechanics would often keep a dirty one laying around just to show it to customers and tell them that it was their filter and it needed replaced. He always got a kick out of calling them out on that kind of bullshit.

One time my teacher in high school wrote somewhere in a HUGE word problem that we’d get credit if we filled in letter E (which was on the scantron machine but not a valid option for that question). They were just seeing who actually read the question from start to finish.

Not me, but an old coworker used a similar trick to see if reviewers were actually reading his documentation. Before sending a large document out for review he would add a sentence to some random paragraph stating, "If you read this, come to my office and I will give you $20." Surprisingly few people ever came for the money.

I use this VH trick at work occasionally for fun just to see if anyone reads my service report. "Your boilers are about to fail in the middle of winter but don't worry I sprinkled pixie dust on them and did a rain dance". Never heard from anyone not even my boss. One customer I used to write "Does anyone ever read these? If so call me at (phone number)". I handed it to the man in charge, he pretended to read it, signed it and handed it back to me. The only one my boss called about was the one I wrote that simply said "I took a shit in the floor drain here"