It is not known

Me: well, someone can’t be wholly rotten inside.

Alan: Hitler liked kittens.

Me: who doesn’t like kittens, though

Alan: Mao? Probably.

Me: It is not known if Kim Jong-il is a fan of kittens

It’s not bigotry. It’s ignorance.

Alan: Could you email [new girl] your style guide, perchance? Her surname is [new girl surname].

Me: got it.

Me: is she related to [other colleague]?

Alan: As far as I’m aware, no. Weird coincidence, though.

Me: indeed

Me: I’ve never heard of the name [other colleague and new girl surname], which is why I ask.

Me: I’m not a bigot.

Alan: Larissa “THEY’RE ALL THE SAME” Gillotti.

Alan: Your secret is safe with me.

Robots, unicorns and Stanley Kubrick

Alan: Together we are robots, divided we are unicorns.

Me: I can’t decide which I’d prefer to be, honestly.

Alan: Let’s go to Candy Mountain, Charlie!

Me: I mean, robots are pretty bad@ss…

Me: but in the ‘I’d like to have my own robot’ kind of way

Me: not the ‘I’d like to be a mindless robot’ way

Me: unless you were a sentient robot

Alan: And then it’d be 2001: A Space Odyssey all over again

Alan: LARISSA 9000

Me: just what do you think you’re doing, Alan?

Me: man, that film both weirded and freaked me out at the same time.

Alan: Kubrick rocks.

Me: if by ‘rocks’ you mean ‘is a total weirdo’.

I'm watching you.

People are weird on the internet

me: Someone came to my blog by searching for “halige sex” on the internet. [twice]

Alan: ?!

me: I mean, I know why they ended up there.

Alan: I don’t think I want to know.

me: But I don’t really want to know what they were really searching for when they put “halige sex” into Google.

Alan: indeed

me: I used to talk about Old English a lot.

me: And “halige” is an inflected form of of the word “halig”, which means holy.

me: But I don’t think they were really looking for “holy sex” in Anglo-Saxon literature.

Alan: Even by the standards of the internet, that would be an impressively specific fetish.

Well – my curiosity got the best of me, and Urban Dictionary soon made everything clear. “Halige” is “another way to say Let’s play some Halo.” There was clearly a enormous chasm in the (modern) English lexicon, and this word filled it, people.

Why someone would be looking for some Halo-playing cybersex buddies has yet to be fully analysed – and lies outside the scope of this blog post.

Spotify Premium angers me

me: is it time to go home yet?

Alan: if we lived in a civilised socialist paradise, it might well be, comrade

Alan:  \BUT NO\

me: haha

Alan: I don’t think they can handle this. WOO

me: I can’t get spotify to download the Spice Girls from the other week, MUCH LESS DESTINY’S CHILD.

Alan: spotify brings shame upon web 2.0

Alan: shaaaaaaame.

me: let’s go over to Sweden and knife them.

me: teach some lessons.

Alan: meatballs and tolerance? TAKE THIS, SUCKERS

me: we can throw flat-pack furniture at them.

Alan: Sweet justice

I swear I work really hard.

Except on beautifully sunny days.

Sometimes you just gotta lay the smack down

[Marching up and interrupting a conversation my office nemesis* started with my boss’s colleague about an issue that falls entirely under my remit (and most certainly not under the remit of my boss’s colleague)]

“I’m sorry, but why am I not part of this conversation?”

“Oh, um…”

Later:

[Talking about an en dash I inserted]

“There isn’t supposed to be a hyphen.”

“For consistency’s sake, an en dash was necessary, so I inserted it.”

“But it’s not being used in any of the other marketing materials.”

“I’ll need to see some of these marketing materials.”

“This has been passed down from above. You can trust it.”

“No, I can’t.”

“No, really, the name of the product doesn’t have a dash anywhere else.”

“Show me some marketing materials without the en dash… And I’ll happily consider your request.”

Post-5pm, after I came in at 8:30am and worked through much of my lunch break, after my ability to employ capitalisation and punctuation conventions had already been questioned earlier by someone who most certainly had no business questioning it**, and after scrambling to do my best to manage all ongoing changes to the website while simultaneously briefing a contract sub-editor and trying vainly to organise someone else’s unwieldy project in preparation for this contract sub-editor to start work in addition to trying to fit in obligatory content reviews for an upcoming audit –

Well –

I just don’t have a lot of time for your bullshit.

*I used to think this person just was difficult to work with. But I’ve come to realise it’s just that this person is an awful human being. My mild professional dislike has escalated somewhat.

**as evidenced by her prefacing her statement with “I’m not a master of grammar or punctuation, but…”

This is what happens

…when you’re bored at work and discover jaunty emoticons.

brewskies

I’ve found that people get really uncomfortable when I use the word ‘brewskies’ in reference to beers or drinks in general. Because of this, I use ‘brewskies’  whenever the opportunity presents itself. It would seem I really enjoy making people feel awkward.

But recently I’ve discovered the linguistic discomfort doesn’t end at ‘brewskies’, oh no. In fact, appending -ski to just about any word in the English language causes people to recoil in vague disgust.

This has opened an entirely new window of discomfort-causing opportunity.

[08:58]<larissa> should i give them a date?
[08:58]<larissa> to turn the review around by?
[08:58]<larissa> they love giving me dates
[08:58]<robin> yes, defo
[08:58]<larissa> what's realistic
[08:58]<larissa> considering they're not really going to look at it anyway
[08:58]<robin> thursday

[09:01]<larissa> doneski
[09:02]<robin> yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh
[09:02]<robin> stop it
[09:02]<larissa> noski
[09:02]<robin> my ears are bleeding
[09:02]<larissa> goodski
[09:02]<robin> or eyes
[09:02]<robin> seeing as you wrote it
[09:02]<larissa> thank you captain obviouski
[09:02]<robin> i am littering em dashes throughout the site*
[09:03]<larissa> noooooooooooooooooooo-ski
[09:03]<robin> it's two late
[09:03]<larissa> literally lol
[09:03]<larissa> ski
[09:04]<robin> you're hurting me

[09:06]<larissa> I'm totally going to blogski this.

____________________________________________________________

*I have a strict en-dashes-only rule when it comes to the website

RSS Readers

Me: I don’t understand people who don’t have RSS Readers.

Alan: [non-committal noise]

Me: I mean, I’m going to subscribe to Linzi’s blog now so that I can read it whenever she updates [logging in to Google Reader]. Except I subscribe to a lot of blogs that I don’t read anymore.

Alan: That’s the problem with Readers, I guess. You can get overloaded.

Me: See, like all these vegetarian blogs. I never read them anymore. Because I don’t cook anymore. All I have time for is drinking. [unsubscribe all]