Hi.
Maybe I'll be making a fool of myself over and over with this, but I would like to tell you something. Maybe April's fool is funny because this kind of messages appear and some people can't stop laughing at them. April's fool is a local convention for joking, or something similar. That is, not everyone catches it when they see it. Ok, maybe in a local group of people that's fine. It's not funny when you simply don't know that April's fool exists. We all speak english, but we are not all from the US, or Europe, or wherever April's fool is known. Ok, maybe that's the funny part of it. Perhaps you will consider what follows even funnier.
1. I was phoned and asked if I had downloaded my mail. No, I hadn't. 2. Blablabla. Microsoft did that? Incredible. 3. If I could translate it asap so we all can read it, because it's pretty important and so? Yeah, sure.
So I got the saved message transferred directly to my machine and I started translating. When the phone call came, I was supposed to cook dinner for everyone here, which I didn't because of the asap. I was working on the #intSqrt stuff, which I also delayed. 40 minutes of translating. More time transferring it. Money in phone calls. Funny, isn't it? Yeah, lots of fun. What's even funnier is what was done with that translation. Hours of our copious free time working for April's fool management.
Nevertheless, I have some copious free time to waste now and then. I trashed dinner and delayed my research, I have copious free time. But for instance, one of the guys who called me has zero free time. When I think about him wasting at least an hour which he doesn't have, getting excited, happy and so, the censored stuff comes to my mind. He has to work full time to eat, and I mean really full. Zero rest time, except when he sleeps. When I phone him he's always either working, eating while he works, working somewhere else or sleeping. Although he works that much, when you ask for the contents of his pockets you end up asking yourself "that little?".
Maybe that's what's fun for some of you. What would you think of us if when you visited our country we played all kind of our own circus stuff on you? Circus stuff you are not even prepared to be suspicious of. Yeah, great fun, isn't it?
By now, you all know what I think about this:
[ self hands write: Censored atRandom. self finished ] whileFalse "doIt"
.. .. ..
Now I have made an overkill fool of myself. That's fun, isn't it?
Your cultural environment is not the only one. Publish the rules before playing. Paraphrase as you like.
Andres.
Hi,
sqrmax@cvtci.com.ar wrote:
messages appear and some people can't stop laughing at them. April's fool is a local convention for joking, or something similar. That is, not everyone catches it when they see it. Ok, maybe in a local group of people that's fine. It's not funny when you simply don't know that April's fool exists. We all speak english, but we are not all from the US, or Europe, or wherever April's fool is known.
Things do happen when communicating across culture boundaries. I remember myself once received a message with the first line telling "HAPPY THANKSGIVING". I wondered what wrong thanks could I give to my friend who wrote it, and because my last message to him was some two months ago and I was not sure but wanted to know exactly what wrong thanks did insult my friend, I went to our sysadmin to ask him to restore my original message from that month's backup tape. Ok, read it and still don't understand why. At the same time my collegue asks me if I know what 'HAPPY THANKSGIVING' is supposed to mean. - What??? You too???? After that the whole lab stopped working until we finally uncovered the matter.
After that, I don't even think about complaining about time wasted on inter-cultural misunderstanding...
Boris
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