Say what you mean and mean what you say
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 10/Jun/2011 04:28, 34 days ago
Today’s blog was brought to me by a convergence ofthe Mad Hatter’s Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland (https://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/wonder/ch7.html), a signature line from one of the other CUSO-VSO volunteers, and a computer software company.The Mad Hatter’s tea party contains an admirable discussion on saying what you mean and meaning what you say.But in a conversation how do you deal with somebody who does not say what is meant, nor mean what is said? You can see that poor old Alice at the head of the table is having a hard time with it - she essentially got the wrong answer while the mad hatter and the rabbit got the correct solution.I was innocently going about my business yesterday when I fell victim to a non-meaner and non-sayer.It took me a little while to work out what was going on, but I eventually did, but I lost an evening of time.So this blog is aimed towards saving others from this frustration.I pursued an interesting little journey in pursuit of the solution.I am fortunate enough to have a computer that is two computers.I did say that and I do mean that.On one side, counting as one computer, I have the Mac programs that were able to connect to the Internet.On the other side, counting as the second computer, I have my PC side that used the same modem as the Mac side, and until two days ago could also connect to the Internet.All of a sudden my PC side could no longer connect while my Mac side continued on, business as usual.What had happened?Who could say to me what had happened?Given my knowledge of computers, could I count on knowing the meaning of what was said to me?The really irritating discovery was that I later learned that I could work out the meaning of words, but not by reading what I had read.I could only work out the meaning by pretending to be the other person and thinking what they meant, which was not the same as what they said.Being a former auditor, I decided to follow through the steps logically and carefully note what happened at each roadblock.I started up my Internet browser and within a second or two my screen displayed the message“can’t find server at search.avg.com”.Many thoughts crossed my mind including:Why are we looking for this weird file anyway?Well try looking harder you lazy ##!!!?%% browser!Oh my gosh, some evil computer hacker has wiped out my AVG anti-virus program’s website, so what hope is there for my little computer that mistakenly relied on this free on-line anti-virus program?So to cut a longish story short, I looked at an on-line help forum using the Mac side of the computer. (I was lucky I had two computers in my one computer). The forum contained gobbledygook.Not because I did not know computerese, but because it was just meandering garbage that conveyed no message.Usually computerese follows this format– hace frio your horno-tostador, and if that doesn’t work do this, etc -very specific instructions.And the beauty of the Internet is that if you have absolutely no idea what a horno-tostador is, you can Google search it and learn, and you’re another step closer to solving your problem.And then there was this flash from above and it all made sense.Putting myself in AVG’s position, AVG was saying to me that I had used their anti-virus protection for free for six whole months and there was no way I was going to continue getting it free for ever.This was the case even though the on-line information marketed them as having unlimited duration free protection for the limited virus protection program I was using.This lead to the thought that AVG wanted cash from me, so I upgraded to one of their non-free programs and sent them some money using my credit card.Miraculously, the server at search.avg.com could be found again.I had guessed correctly.My $34.99 US was used to pay the janitor to search around in the AVG factory and by astute searchinghe found the server that couldn’t be found before.Thanks bud!I didn’t grudge them the money – the janitor couldn’t work for free and they had provided a service that protected my computer, but why couldn’t they have specifically just said what they meant? But at least now, my PC side is no longer