“
It’s an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, Man had always assumed that he was the most intelligent species occupying the planet, instead of the *third* most intelligent. The second most intelligent creatures were of course dolphins who, curiously enough, had long known of the impending destruction of the planet earth.
They had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger, but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits. So they eventually decided they would leave earth by their own means.
The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the star-spangled banner, but in fact the message was this: “So long and thanks for all the fish.”
” — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Truth is not measured in mass appeal
(Source: shemmadee, via oola-laa)
“If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have to at least consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.” — Douglas Adams
“Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why.”
For the past 7 years now, I’ve been abstaining from drinking alcohol, completely. No occasional after-work beer with coworkers, not a sip or even a taste of alcoholic drinks. Nothing. Zip. Nada. 7 whole years (and 6 months, as I’m writing this). Okay I have to admit, during this time I have actually eaten foods that were partly made with alcohol; like for instance, a nice entrecôte beef steak with some nice red wine sauce. I mean how can you say no to that? And it’s in the food, which means it was cooked, so there’s no alcohol left in it, right? Well anyways, that was my only exception to the rule. And yes, I did go for after-work beer with my coworkers and I did go to bars and clubs too, but I always took something non-alcoholic.
It all started on a very ordinary new year’s eve. The year 2005 was just about to begin and I was having fun with my friends, drinking, like any other 20 year old person would at that time of the year. At some point, the conversation turned into a talk about new year’s resolutions and everyone was telling about all kinds of promises they were going to (at least try to) keep during the next year. Most of the promises were pretty trivial and some were a bit more ambitious, but there was one particular promise that was brought up more often than others; abstain from alcohol for the whole month of January (also known as “tipaton tammikuu” in Finnish). Of course every time someone said that, it resulted in a burst of laughing and saying things like “Oh you’d never survive that month!”, or “You so can’t do it!”.
Now that I think about it, that sounds a bit grim. How hard is it to abstain from drinking alcohol for one single month? Surely none of us were actually alcoholic, and none of us drank more than maybe 2-3 times a month anyways, so what’s the problem then? In my opinion, I think it’s just a psychological thing; when ever a human being is presented with a limitation or a constraint, the natural instinct is to break it. I guess the biggest issue with this kind of a challenge was our young age. The whole point of being young is to have fun, explore, find your limits, get into trouble, make mistakes, and most importantly: learn from your mistakes. Alcohol has a quite big part in that whole experience.
At this point, I should probably clarify that this all happened in a country called Finland. The legal age to drink alcohol in Finland is 18. Basically, when you turn 18, you can buy anything that has less than 21% of alcohol from any store. This includes beers, ciders, most of the wines, etc., but not the harder stuff like vodka, whiskey, cognac, etc. When you turn 20, you can buy anything that is legally sold in stores in Finland. But of course, even though the legal age is 18, people always starts to experiment with alcohol much earlier than that. Everyone always know someone who is over 18, and who can get you some, so it’s not really an issue. My personal first experience with the substance was at the tender age of 14. Not my proudest moments there and it’s not an age I’d recommend anyone to try it at either. But I digress.
So there we were, joking about the new year’s resolutions, when suddenly one of the friends had an brilliant idea; “Why don’t we make a wager out of it?”. I don’t know if it was the alcohol we had consumed, or something else, but at that time it seemed like a great way to test our limits in a way that appealed to many of us; involving money. After a lengthy discussion about the rules and constraints, and who’d be involved, we finally came to an agreement. There was 4 of us who were going to put in 100 euros as a wager that we can abstain from drinking. So who ever came out as a winner (as in, who survived the longest), the losers would each have to pay 100 euros. At the time, most of us were either students or unemployed, so the 300 euros (~$380) was a lot of money. “Could buy a lot of booze with that”, someone said. Everyone laughed.
Two weeks passed when the first one was out of the game. To his defence, it was his brother’s bachelor party that did it. Those things tend to be pretty alcohol centric. Second one lasted 2 whole months, until he accidentally (his words) had a nice cold beer after a sauna. The third one caved in at month 4. And that was it, the game was finished, I won.
We were to celebrate my victory the next weekend from that, which meant alcohol was going to be involved in this celebration. The weekend came and we gathered to my friend’s place with all the attendees. Much to my friends’ surprise, I declared that I wasn’t going to end my abstinence that night, but instead, I was going to see how long I could actually do without it. After a lengthy, yet friendly and comical argument, my friends agreed to drink my part of the alcohol and let me continue with my “crazy experiment”.
I don’t think I ever had any kind of problem with the not drinking part. However, what I soon learned, was that there was a lot of other people in my life who seemed to have a problem with it. It wasn’t just the people who already existed in my life, but also the new people that I met. This particular paradigm also generated some awkward moments. The most common one was when I was at a bar/club/wherever with my friends and someone bought a drink for me without my prior agreement. Luckily the funny thing about alcohol is, that it has a unique attribute: there’s always someone who will consume it, if no one else does. This attribute is particularly prominent in Finland.
Some people even took offence from my non-drinkenness, and I actually had to re-assess my relationships with certain people. Likewise, certain people seemed to have re-assessed their relationships with me, and they actually preferred to not include me with their activities some of the time, at least when it involved alcohol. While this was understandable, I still felt slightly left out, mostly because even though people tend to always party with alcohol, it is not a necessity.
I think the biggest problem for most of those people who “left me out”, was that they weren’t sure how to approach the situation. They weren’t sure what was my general opinion about drinking. Whether I felt pressured or tempted or even insulted, or whether I thought drinking was bad altogether. They didn’t feel the need to find out either. It was just easier to not have that one exception in the group. Again, understandable.
Of course there’s also people who just keeps pushing it. Right after they hear that I don’t drink, they’ll start the usual bribing or sometimes even passive aggressive threatening. Then there’s the funny people who immediately starts to come up with the most imaginative life-or-death kind of scenarios and ask me if I’d then break my abstinence. Saddest people are those who ask me “So you never have fun then?”.
I have to admit that my opinion about alcohol has changed a lot during these years, and it actually didn’t take long for me to notice this transition. Spend a few Friday or Saturday nights out partying while you’re sober and you’ll know what I mean. It’s funny how much more you pay attention to little details about people’s behavior and situations. For instance, you can find several distinguishable caricatures from drunk people; there’s the sad quiet kind, loud and annoying, the annoyingly loud ones, violent-when-drunk types, “I love you all” -types, “I hate my life” -types, obnoxious ones, attention whores, the “I have full pints of beer in my hands, so I must now pursue this challenge of squeezing through a full blown mosh-pit” -types, and the list goes on. I think the most comical kind were the people who, after consuming right amount of alcohol, suddenly thought they were able to sing. In comes the karaoke… every time this happens, I die a little inside.
“Alcohol brings the best and worst out of people”, I think I really have to agree on that. There’s a lot of people who know their limits and stick to them, but there’s also a lot of people who don’t. I have nothing against the first group of people, but when I have to deal with the people from the latter group, it makes me very judgemental and disapproving. Especially the kind of people who do stupid things or become violent or act like they can do anything they want, just because they’re drunk. It’s like they give themselves an excuse to behave like idiots, because they can always just blame it on the alcohol afterwards.
So, do I see anything positive about drinking alcohol, you ask? Of course. I’d be lying if I said that alcohol hasn’t played a big part in friendships and other relationships during my adult life. Alcohol makes people more relaxed, and I’ve witnessed it so many times how a generally uptight manager or other colleague can become a nice fellow after a few cold ones at company’s recreational events. And I’m talking about a complete and utterly massive dickhead transforming into a person you can actually have a pleasant conversation with. It always opens up my eyes and makes me see people in different light after seeing them under the influence. It also tells a lot about a person if they can stay within their tolerance of said substance.
Alcohol brings people together - it’s a social catalyst of our times. And much like chemistry, you need the right kind and right amount of actors (people) and substances to not blow things up.
Will I ever drink alcohol again, you ask? Maybe. I haven’t really sworn to never drink again, nor do I have any arbitrary milestone for my abstinence. If it happens, it happens.
I normally won’t give a damn about some big corporations having badly designed websites, but I just found the most ingenious web form ever implemented and I wanted to share the frustration I just experienced.
For some unrelated reasons I wanted to contact the Henkel Corporation and I looked up their website and found a contact form and immediately noticed a few things that were a bit off about it. For instance, why is there so many mandatory fields? Even the address details? Date of Birth? Really? The Country field has only two options, United States and Canada. So you don’t want anyone outside those countries contacting you? Why?
Okay, fine, lets just go with it and fill the form:
Then the CAPTCHA. Oh boy, looks like a proprietary captcha, lets hope it works.
So this is what I see:
Okay, there’s U, M and X and some weird symbol. The symbol does not resemble any letter that I know of, so lets just input UMX.
Error. Verification failed. Okay, lets try again:
There’s yet another weird symbol that I can’t recognize. Lets try YIQ:
Error. Verification failed.
*facepalm*
I had to give it two more tries until I got an image that had all of the characters recognizable. And finally it worked.
Last but not least: Of course the “yes, send me spam” option is selected by default.
While I was digging for the maximum character limit for the comment field (which by the way for some reason was done with Javascript instead of the built-in maxlength attribute, which was introduced back in 1995 for HTML 2.0 for INPUT elements), I discovered things that made me regret ever digging deeper. Of course the Javascript codes were not minified/compressed/uglified in any way, so it was very easy to find what I was looking for. I soon realized I had opened a can of worms.
For instance, the check_age -function is totally DailyWTF material:
function check_age()
{
var date=parseInt(document.contact_detail.bday.options[document.contact_detail.bday.selectedIndex].value);
var month=(parseInt(document.contact_detail.bmonth.options[document.contact_detail.bmonth.selectedIndex].value)-1);
var year=parseInt(document.contact_detail.byear.options[document.contact_detail.byear.selectedIndex].value);
today = new Date();
dateStr = today.getDate();
monthStr = today.getMonth();
yearStr = today.getFullYear();
theYear = yearStr - year;
theMonth = monthStr - month;
theDate = dateStr - date;
var days = "";
if (monthStr == 0 || monthStr == 2 || monthStr == 4 || monthStr == 6 || monthStr == 7 || monthStr == 9 || monthStr == 11) days = 31;
if (monthStr == 3 || monthStr == 5 || monthStr == 8 || monthStr == 10) days = 30;
//if (monthStr == 1) days = 28;
if (monthStr == 1) //if February, adjust days if leap year or not
{
if (year%400 ==0 || (year%100 != 0 && year%4 == 0)) {days = 29;}
else {days = 28;}
};
inYears = theYear;
if (month < monthStr && date > dateStr) { inYears = parseInt(inYears) + 1;
inMonths = theMonth - 1; }
if (month < monthStr && date dateStr) { inMonths = 11; }
else if (month > monthStr && date monthStr && date > dateStr) { inMonths = ((12 - (theMonth))); }
if (date < dateStr) {inDays = theDate; }
else if (date == dateStr) {inDays = 0; }
else {inYears = inYears - 1; inDays = days - (-(theDate)); }
if (inYears < 18){
URL = "contact_under_age.cfm";
ageWin = window.open(URL, 'ageWin', 'scrollbars=0,width=400,height=400,top=100,left=100,location=1,resizable=yes');
window.ageWin.focus();
return false;
}
}
I can hardly believe what I’m seeing with my own eyes. I am speechless.
At this point I give up. I managed to submit the form and now I’m waiting for a reply, that’s enough for me.. for now.
San Francisco.. need I say more?
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