the bright, burning light of politeness.

The other day there was an intermittent loud honking out in the street. I finally identified it as a silver BMW sedan which would drive up part of the street, honk, do a U-turn in the intersection, honk, drive back down the street. Over and over.

At last I noticed the driver had stopped cruising and parked over by the corner. I decided to go ask them to stop honking their horn. As I walked up to the car it occurred to me that there are a few folks living in the area who might not respond well to some random guy asking them to quiet down. I decided to deal with that if it happened.

As soon as I saw the young man in the driver's seat, I felt a little awkward, because he had a fascinating array of tattoos, most of which I would (admittedly in ignorance of the details) associate with gangs and/or prison time. You know how some criminals have teardrops tattooed under their eyes, typically assuming to correspond to people they killed? This guy had musical notes. A quarter note and then an eighth note, if I remember right. Well, okay, maybe I'm about to go ask a gang member to keep the noise down. No point in turning back now.

"Excuse me, sir? Are you the one honking his horn?"

The driver looked furtively around, in pretty much any direction except my face. He is looking at his phone.

"Yeah, I just gotta meet my friend at this intersection."
This is new. "You don't know where he lives?"
"Nah, he just said this intersection."

Still looking everywhere but at me.

"Is there anything I can do to help you find him? The honking is pretty disruptive."
"Nah, I just gotta wait for him."

 Luckily for our driver, I spot another young man coming down the street toward us, clearly the awaited passenger.

 "Oh, this is him..."
"All right. If you can stop the honking, I'd appreciate it."

And then back to the house.

I hate to draw conclusions about people, but I'm going to assume that our tattooed driver, furtively honking and looking around for a guy he doesn't know to come meet him at a specific intersection--rather than, say, an address--was involved  in some criminal activity. Some theory, some observation:

1. There's no criminal genius here. Nothing about this episode screams "Professor Moriarty."
2. It's interesting to just walk up and ask. It could go bad, but...
3. ...I think the young man didn't like the attention. I've written before about how you alter the situation by just being there and letting someone know they are seen. I'm hoping that by signaling that sketchy activity is noticed, they'll take it elsewhere.

Ah, city living.

kicking over anthills

I pushed some boundaries at work today. I don't know if I was pissing people off or not, but I was definitely causing a bit of a ruckus.

I was a bit crabby last night, as one of my team members told me about an Important Thing broken at work that really should have been fixed a while ago. I started writing an email last night, then decided to wait until this morning so I could hassle people in person. Good choice, right?

This morning I sent an email to This Guy and his boss (who is also my boss). In some company cultures, this is a kind of sandbagging, where you escalate an issue above someone's head to get their boss to yell at them about it. In the Male Status Game, this ends up as a shaming maneuver that makes someone lose face. I didn't really mean it that way, though. The two of them combined should be able to produce an answer as to why Important Thing was broken, and whether it was going to be fixed. If it wasn't going to be fixed, I needed to know that, so I could implement some kind of workaround.

Unfortunately, I was a bit irritable this morning, and the response of "Important Thing is really high-priority for us, we're working on it right now" didn't really hold water. I call bullshit when you say that something is "high priority," but it's been broken for weeks, there's no estimated time for fixing it, and the entire company is going "Gosh, I guess we gave up on the Important Thing. Too bad it was so incredibly expensive." The magic words at our company are "this is blocking us from getting things done," and that, erm, stimulated some activity. Important Thing got fixed within a couple hours. One of the Ops guys got leaned on to do it, but the situation was really not okay. Every team desperately needs the data that Important Thing provides.

When I put it that way, I think I was just fulfilling one of my key roles in the organization, which is to get irritated and say, "This is needlessly stupid. Can we please fix it now?". If I ruffled feathers unduly, I'm sure I'll hear about it.

I think it says a lot about the difficulties of humans that in the most transparent company I've ever seen, we still need to work on our internal communication.

surprise

I've been enjoying my break. I went into school today because in theory a couple of girls show up at 1:30 on Fridays for "English Workshop," which is me stumbling around trying to find something English-related for them to do. They haven't been showing up recently, but over time they have, and it seemed respectful of their (slight) extra effort for me to be there.

My classroom, though, had been re-arranged into a standard Chilean classroom. Normally I have 25-35 writing-chairs in there, and twice a week there's a Spanish-language writing class in there and I have to rearrange all the chairs. Those chairs are now gone, and there's the standard rows of 2-person tables. There had already been 3 stacks of those tables stored in the room, but where did all the chairs come from? From the trash and notebooks left behind, there had obviously been a full curso in there, not just the writing workshop. Okay, that's a little weird, but while I was waiting, I stacked up the tables and moved everything around, thinking that if I didn't do it today, I'd have to do it Tuesday morning.

On my way out to go have lunch with Sara, I ran into Paloma, one of the girls from 1-A. When I went back into the room to lock up, she said "Don't go into my classroom!". I said, "Your classroom?" and we bantered a bit, and when I came back out we talked some more and I discovered that 1-A has actually been moved from their classroom into mine, and theirs is currently being used to store "papers." Since the national standardized SIMCE test is coming up and the teachers have been collating piles of photocopies, I'm guessing their classroom is being used as secure storage for the tests. (My classroom has cheap hollow-core doors and a bad doorknob lock, while the main classrooms have metal doors and deadbolts.)

So who knows if I have a place to teach next week. Plus Friday is Teacher's Day, so no classes then. Ah, Chile!

the internet keeps us sane

Our experience of living abroad is unbelievably different from even a decade ago, and almost unrecognizable from my parents' stories of living in Germany for a couple years around 1970. Chile is more developed than ever, of course, but more important is the growth of Internet technologies that let us communicate even more easily. In 1970 you waited weeks and months for a quick, expensive satellite phone call, or for letters. Now, in ascending order of appearance and shininess...

• Email: Duh. Part of why the U.S. Postal Service is dying. (The other part is stupid legislation that forced them to fund their pension obligations 7 years into the future, which isn't required of any other organization, because it's INSANE.)
• Facebook: Social media blah blah blah wank wank wank.
• Skype: Computer-to-computer voice/video connection, plus it will call normal phone numbers if you pay money. (Payment is only via Paypal; I tried, Paypal shut down my account for trying to use it from South America, and it's a multi-step process to re-activate it.)
• Google Voice: Having shut down my cell phone number of the past decade, Google Voice gives me a phone number I can give to people that will transfer calls to whatever cell phone I get back home, as well as use the Internet to make free long-distance calls. In the meantime, people can leave messages for me and I can get them off the website, and I can trade text messages with Anna.
• Gmail Voice Chat: Okay, voice chat between Gmail users, which isn't so exciting, until...
• Gmail Voice Chat + Google Voice: Now, Gmail Voice Chat essentially becomes a telephone: I can call any U.S. phone number for free, and any calls to my Google Voice number will ring in my web browser. Yes, that's right, if I'm online, you can pick up your telephone and call me, while I'm in South America, for the cost of calling California.

Yes, we live in the future.

no, seriously, I meant "slower."

I don't make national or cultural generalizations lightly, and in truth I don't find a ton of things I'm willing to say about "Chileans." I will say that they're generally extremely friendly and family-oriented, more reserved than their various Latin American colleagues, and they take a deep joy in sharing with others that I've never seen before.

They also don't listen.

Most humans have trouble with listening. What happens is that our conversations actually happen in our minds, and instead of really listening to the person in front of us, what they say passes through our internal translator made up of who we think they are. This is how someone says "I feel like you don't enjoy going to the opera with me," and we later remember them saying "I'm really disappointed in you that you don't like going to the opera, and I think it shows that you don't like me that much." Then we compound the problem by reacting to what we heard instead to what they said--"Dammit, how can she think I don't like her? Don't I do all these things to show it?"--and then we feel sulky and unappreciated, and on it goes.

Meanwhile, the other person is probably having a conversation completely different from what you're having, and you're both going insane. Let's call these "imaginary conversations."

This is all normal, and happens even between people who know each other well and who know the phenomenon. In Chile, the culture is monolithic enough that it often seems like there's an imaginary conversation shared by all Chileans, and specific conversations are just brief departures from it, like fish jumping out of the water and then continuing downstream. If you're Chilean, this is all very natural. For a foreigner, though, they're often not actually listening to what you're saying, and just continuing with their customary imaginary conversation.

One great example is asking people to speak slower: they don't. It goes like this (today's example):

Chilean: [incomprehensible blur of Spanish words]

Chris: Can you repeat that more slowly?

Chilean: [nodding] Ah, ya. [repeats self, at least as fast as the first time]

Or this conversation that I also had today:

Chilean: Are you Chilean?

Chris: [stunned] Uh, no, I'm American.

Chilean: Really? You understood everything. And you speak really well.

Chris: Oh, thanks, but I actually only understand about fifty percent of what people say.

Chilean: Nah, you manage really well.

I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but deep listening was not part of it. To be fair, it was after aikido class, and I do understand more of aikido, because I have enough training to complement what I can understand of the language. Plus, words associated with aikido were the only thing I studied before I came.

I wonder if people actually think I'm Chilean, and how they see me that way. I must appear to be a blue-eyed, white, hearing-impaired Chilean with a speech impediment.

[UPDATE: Anna informs me that the word for this is a "high-context culture," where there is so much shared knowledge in the culture that the words actually spoken in conversation don't carry as much of the information as we're used to in the U.S.]

communication is a myth

My little brother is only two years younger than me, and every summer there was a quest to find ways to get rid of us find stuff for us to do during the summer days. This was back when cities could afford to offer services, and it turned out that tennis lessons (taught by one of my older brother's friends) worked well for us. It felt sort of familiar, since Mom had played at a club in town for a long time. So we played tennis for however many years.

My family has been lucky enough to spend regular chunks of time on Cape Cod throughout my life, and the house there is a short walk through the woods past the cemetery to a nearby condo development, with a tennis court. It's locked in a cage of split logs and chicken wire, with a combination lock, but the condos are mostly vacation rentals, so anyone will give you the combination, and we'd go and play pretty regularly, especially the summer we were working down there in the mid-90s.

(There, I once played this cute girl, who was one of those overdriven young athletes, with her own cranky Australian coach and everything, who wanted to make sure I'd be "enough of a challenge for her." She beat me, but it was harder than it should have been, and she was extremely frustrated at her inability to beat me faster. Not only am I a halfway decent tennis player, but at the time, I had an uncontrollable forehand with backspin on it, and it was just messing with her head. Now I can control it, and it still messes with people's heads.)

Our tennis excursions came up back home sometime later.

"No one stops you?", Mom asked.

"Yeah, you just walk in and play."

"It's not whites-only?"

I don't come from racist folk, so there was a confused, awkward silence.

"Um...isn't that illegal?"

Mom, of course, meant the traditional dress code--a feature of her tennis experiences, but not ours.

calling a time-out

I stopped class with 1-G today. The speaking exercise was getting sort of disordered, which is normal for them, but a couple other things happened.

A major part of my classroom management is a corner of the board that has three boxes, with one, two, and three frownie-faces in them. That last one also says "Inspector," the last step on Ye Olde Ladder of Consequences. The inspectoria is the school's disciplinary arm, and because this is a select school, the inspectores have a certain amount of power that they don't necessarily have elsewhere--too much disciplinary trouble and they'll be kicked out of a school they tried reasonably hard to get into. Kids usually take the board reasonably seriously, especially if they're one step away from getting booted instead of two.

As happens occasionally, one girl went and erased her name off the board. It's one of those signs of the lack of hierarchy and authority in schools. I'm not sure what they're hoping will happen, but I just kick them up to the next box.

Then I noticed that another girl, instead of holding one index card, was holding a stack: she'd taken the cards for the next exercise off my table. She also didn't give them back immediately, like a really obnoxious child (which, for this particular moment, she was).

Clearly we all needed to have a chat. I had everyone sit down, and I thought for a minute, and then sat on my table. This is unusual, and gets everyone's attention.

"Okay. I don't know exactly how it is here in Chile, but in North America, taking someone's stuff is disrespectful. Here, too?"

Nods and murmurs.

"Good. Now, do you guys know why I have that box in the corner of the board? Why I don't just send you to the Inspector immediately?"

"To write down who's bad?"
"Hmm. Not exactly."

Bruno speaks. Bruno, who's usually a step away from the Inspector, every class. Last week he came up to me after class, looked me in the eyes, and shook my hand, and he's done it since, every time I see him in the hall.

"To give us an opportunity."

Awesome.

"That's right. To give you a chance. Now, all these activities we do are ways for you guys to practice and use English. The way English is taught here--"

"It's really bad."

"Right. You don't learn a lot of English in your classes here?" Nods and murmurs. "That's why I'm here. To help you guys practice so you can learn. A lot of you say 'I can't, I can't,' but I know you can, because I gave you a test and I talked to each one of you, and I'm really proud of all of you and everything you worked hard to learn. Think you can keep going with class?"

Nods and murmurs.

And off we went.

I like my kids.

Also, I appear to have the patience of a saint.

hidden history

In software, we learn that many things that now look like horrible choices actually started as the reasonable solution to a problem. I don't want to give too much benefit of the doubt here: most programmers are idiots, and a lot of the time it's actually a bad choice. Those of us who do horrible things to software on purpose salve our wounded consciences by adding a useful comment with a bug number, so future generations can look up the story and not hate us. Then we drink until the pain goes away.

One of my favorite code stories is the Hardest Bug Of My Career, which of course happened at Danger. It took me about 2 months to figure out, spending 2-3 days a week on it. For those of you not in the trade, that's an absurd amount of time. Most bugs yield their secrets much more quickly, but this was important. A critical step in our Sidekick-data service communication, called the "Dropbox," would periodically fail with an out-of-memory error as my server tried to store it in the database. Fair enough, it was a 3MB XML document...but the server had 2GB of memory. Finally I traced it to how the XML parser would accumulate a block of text, which used a totally simple and reasonable approach, which given a 3MB block of text would use up all the memory and bring the machine to a screeching halt. The problem was with blocks of text in what's called Base64, which are defined to have newlines every 72 characters; in order to fix the problem, I had to remove those newlines, which is a crazy, screwy-looking thing to do. And then a few weeks later that broke our email delivery, and the email guy had to restore those newlines, which is also a crazy, screwy-looking thing to do. We commented our changes, a courtesy not often extended by our predecessors.

On a vaster scale, you can read Joel Spolsky's excellent classic, Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?.

I was reminded of all this because the professional soccer team, based in Valparaíso, in a Spanish-speaking country, is the "Santiago Wanderers." This makes absolutely no sense to me. The supposed history in Wikipedia tells me:

Despite its place of origin, the founders decided to name it Santiago to distinguish the club from another team in the city that existed at that time, the Valparaíso Wanderers. On several occasions, attempts were made to replace Santiago with Valparaíso as a way to ratify the link with the city. However, the idea has been highly rejected by the fans.

Okay, fair enough. Does that actually help? Now I want to know:

1. Why didn't they call it "Puerto Wanderers" or something else still related to Valparaíso?
2. Why is it "Wanderers"? In English? For multiple teams?

There's always just more questions.

even if you knew, would it help?

Before my class yesterday, Belinda asked for my help with in translating something from English into Spanish. She's one of the Chinese teachers; they're both from China, and I don't know about the other teacher, but Belinda's English and Spanish are both kind of low intermediate. I'm not sure why she asked me, instead of someone who, say, speaks Spanish, but I'm happy to help.

At the appointed time, she shows me a list, with Chinese characters on the left and English translations on the right. She points to the first one, which I duly examine, and find:

• International Paper-cut Fine Works

Which strikes me as an excellent Dadaist company name worth remembering, but doesn't actually make any sense. I explain what a "paper-cut" is in English, and how that can't be what they meant, and what exactly am I looking at? Translation without context: difficult to impossible. (Something to do with the art of intricate paper-cutting.)

Book titles, she said.

Ooookay. I scan down the list of nearly 30 books.

• Catching the Red Boy
• Monkey Makes Chaos In Heaven
• 100 Chinese Two-Part Allegories
• Advanced Chinese for Business

"What are these books for?"

"For the students. Translate the titles, but then students can't find the books."

I think these are the books the Ministry wants her to use in her class. Notwithstanding the quantity of material, most of the books are in Chinese and English, and the students can't read either one. So the school asked her to translate the titles (already translated into English) into Spanish, I think to enter into the computer for some reason? She seemed very confused, and we were having trouble communicating.

Finally I said, "You know, I am often lost here, because I'm not from this culture either. If they say you need to translate the titles, you just have to translate the titles. It's probably not important to know why."

And if it is, you'll find that out, too.