Grace Hall is currently experiencing an active fire alarm. While sitting out here in the cold (on a rock), I remembered the following story about fire drills and conditioning your audience to expect certain things.

We had to hold ten fire drills a year when I was in elementary school. Concern that a bunch of six-year-olds wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of their first fire drills prompted the school principal to call each of the kindergarten class rooms to pre-announce the first two.

You can probably see where this is going: the third of ten planned fire drills was unannounced, so naturally, we all panicked.

• The “Check in” item is right below the “Save As” item in the File menu of CS3. If you accidentally hit that item, it changes the Save As dialogue box to the Adobe style. You have to click on the “Use OS Dialogue” button to get it to go back.
• When transferring money out of PayPal, why is the “cancel” button in the lower right corner instead of the “continue” button?
• The five or six seconds after I realize that I’ve accidentally clicked the Time Machine dock icon again are as agonizing as I imagine it would be to realize you just pricked yourself on something in a lab studying infectious disease: it doesn’t react immediately…but you know what’s coming.
• In InDesign’s Links panel options menu, “Link File Info…” and “Link Information…” are  right next to each other. Odds alone would indicate that I would, strictly by accident, pick the one that I need to check which images are RGB at least sometimes, so why do I always hit the wrong first? And while I’m at it, why are they so similarly named and right next to each other in the menu?

These people are already deadly enough as individuals, but imagine the real terror when they come in groups. This is what is known as “Design by Committee”. When you get a bunch of people, who think they are experts in fields they are not, blinded by needless politics and with the mentality that they have to do something in order to impress the boss, and who have friends and spouses who think some color is a better color for –fill in the blanks– than another color, what you end up with, 100% of the time, is crap. I’m not saying no else should have a say other than the designer. What I am encouraging is for the business people to communicate the goals to the designers and ensure everybody is clear and focused on the direction and share appropriate feedback when a submitted design is not meeting the goals. That is how it should work.

Uselessnism

Remember Survivor? (The reality show, not the lame song that former high school football players get misty-eyed about because of its association with Rocky).

When Survivor first aired, I remember thinking “they’re doing all of this for a million bucks? That’s not that much money…” We throw the term “million” around a lot in casual conversation, and it’s sort of minimized as a concept when words that sound the same but begin with “B” and “T” are also common. It makes “a million” seem like a small, approachable number.

It’s not.

I had this hit home for me last week when my account at last.fm went over 35,000 scrobbles for the first time. That’s pretty cool until you consider that I listen to music for hours at a time on a daily basis, and I’ve been scrobbling since December of 2005. 35,000 tracks in a little over 3 years?

A little math:

35,000 tracks in roughly three years is about 11,500 tracks a year (give or take. It’s actually 11,666.6666666 ad infinitum, but I rounded down). In other words, in order to reach 1,000,000 scrobbled tracks I would have to listen to music at the same pace for just under eighty seven years (!).

I didn’t actually believe that so I did the math again: 1,000,000/11,500 = 86.96.

A million is a huge number, but it pales in comparison when you consider that to reach a billion scrobbles I would have to listen at the same 11,500 tracks-per-year pace for 87 thousand years.

I’m going to try to keep this in mind the next time I engage in a little casual hyperbole by telling people I’ve listened to Achtung Baby “a million times.”