413: Communications Are Us

“No, let’s see, not ‘oodagh,’ more like ‘oaaard.’ Yes that’s it.” I heard the sound of computer keys clacking. Then, “Be sure to alter volume with each syllable. This is especially effective for older customers.”

I rounded the corner and walked into the room. There sat C.W. at my desk and working with my computer. He had taken the shape of a young man in his thirties, looking much like a stockbroker, political junkie, or perhaps a defendant at a murder trial.

“Just a moment,” he said. He took breath and blurted, “Wiiikledmardls-wuchlickor-dalysshhicletoody?”

“What on earth?” I said. “Are you working on your Falloonian?”

“No,” he said. “I have a contract. A thought struck him. “Urdootallybeesimoupnoint.”

“What?”

“Pliadouantodsuchantweeedur.” He continued without paying me any attention.

“What kind of contract and with whom?”

“A teaching contract,” he said, at last giving me his full attention. “It’s for a fast food federation.”

“A what?”

“Fast food federation.”

“And what are you doing for a fast food federation?”

“Writing a manual on confusonics.”

“On what?”

“Confusonics. It’s a training manual.”

“Who for?”

“The kids who take orders for fast-food drive-throughs.”

“Come again?”

“It teaches them to speak so there is no possibility that they can be understood by anyone trying to make an order.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, no, the corporations have found that confusion makes money and money makes profits.”

“Confusion?”

“Yes. Confused customers then to order more expensive items.”

“So they teach the kids how not to be understood?”

“Of course,” he said. “Comprehension is the enemy, and is to be avoided."

I shook my head. “It works,” I said.

“It even works better when they rush the customer. Unhurried customers tend to buy cheaper items.”

“I’m glad to see you’ve found a calling.”

“Business is booming,” he said. “We offer free, introductory chewing gum with this product. Want to help?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have an assignment just made for you. It’s from your own profession.”

“Urban planning?”

“Right. It’s for another manual.”

“What manual?”

“It’s called Misunderstanding Upon Demand.”

“Misunderstanding?”

"Good! Next man. How great I am and what
 a pleasure  to serve under me." - C.E.

“Yep. The subtitle will be, Let Your Work Be Clear As MUD Can Make It.”

I must have looked confused, for he took a sheet from the table and read from it. “The plan, using a broad array of self-empowerment aids, will allow citizens to efficaciously move through a time-synchronized myriad of wayfinding enablements to established a community-oriented sense of place.”

I must have looked confused, although a hint of familiar made its lonely way through my comprehensatory mechanisms, as we say.

“That’s just the back-cover blurb of the training manual,” he said. “Neat huh?”

“Are you serious about all this?”

“Maybe you’d rather work on an assignment for the Army.” He picked up another pile of sheets and read. “The strategic and service-wide transitional depositions activated as comprehensive tactical support directives requiring the accommodating of the mandatory incorporation of gender-variable war-wagers into combat-planning doctrine, as previously set forth, are hereby non-mandated and superseded, and the provisions herein are effectuated and installed for immediate dissemination.” He smiled. “Neat huh?”

“So you write training manuals now?”

“Oh, much more than that. I have a major study I’m working on.”

“What kind of study?”

“And in-depth analysis of why young Americans use texting as a replacement for face-to-face conversations.”

See also:

Delta Dreaming

All Hat No Cattle

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299. Confusion

“So why do they call them debates if they don’t debate one another?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why do they call it ‘collateral damage’ when they mean killing innocent people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why do they call it a sport when one side has a weapon and the other doesn’t?”

“Why are you torturing me?” We were in the shop and I was using a hand plane to flatten the surface of a piece of wood too large to go through my power planer. The work was exasperating enough without the inquisitive teenager that C.W. loves to shift into when I’m really busy.

“Why,” I said, “don’t you do something useful and sweep up these shavings?”

“Will you pay me to?”

I just looked at him. “Why do they call them student athletes?” he said.

“Because they don’t call them cowboys,” I said.

“Why do they call it making love when so many women of your species don’t seem to like it at all?”

“Because they don’t call it making pies.”

“Shouldn’t they call it making babies?”

“What do they call in on Falloonia?”

“It’s a long word,” he said, “and you couldn’t pronounce it. In your language it roughly translates into ‘watching the sun set with one eye and a hopeful heart’ or something like that.”

I stopped. “It what?”

“As in,” he said, “when will this be over?”

Sometimes I can’t tell whether he is jacking me around or not. I resumed my planing.

“Here’s one,” he said, “Why do they call it getting it on when they mean getting it in?”

“Do you want my wife to hear you?”

“Sure,” he said. “Maybe she knows about loading cargo into a plane.”

“Are we going somewhere with all this?”

He thought for a moment. “Do you realize,” he said, “how confusing your language is for a visitor to your galaxy?”

“Not so,’ I said. “We have two-year-olds that pick it up without effort.”

He ignored the insult. “So you allow them to reach adulthood using ‘fat-chance’ and ‘slim-chance’ interchangeably?

At this precise moment I gouged the wood and let loose a stream of imprecations, ending with one in Vietnamese that vaguely has some relation or other to one’s mother.

“That’s another thing,” he said. “What about things like …” and he uttered a phrase involving … well I can't say what it involved, other that the act of a flying leap.

“Don’t let my wife hear you saying that.” I said.

“Where do you think I learned it?”

That did it. I laid my planer aside. “Come on,” I said. “You need leadership.”

The best thing about your language, or so
 it seems to me, is its comedic value. - C.W.

“You lead,” he said, “like someone with lead in their pockets.”

I groaned.

“I enjoyed this informal exchange of ideas by spoken words,” he said.

“This conversation,” I said, ‘has cost me a fine piece of wood. And you need to adjust your Galactic Universal translator.”

“I trust my GUT,” he said. “I’ll put it up against yours anytime.”

I groaned and walked away.

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Ask The Alien: Happy Confusion

Dear Ask the Alien:
My gorgeous wife has the cutest routine during a moment of intense emotional exuberance, actually when we are making love. She starts out by yelling “Oh Matthew, Oh Matthew,” then she goes into a mode I can’t describe herein. She ends by almost purring “Thank you Matthew,” in my ear and falling asleep. The experience is so wonderful that I find myself dreaming about it later. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, and have begun to look forward to it.
There’s only one drawback.
My name isn’t Matthew.
Should I worry or just keep enjoying the fun?
Signed,
Misnamed

Dear Misnamed:

Are you kidding me? The worst possible scenario is that somewhere there is someone named Matthew who is getting a much worse deal than you are.
Your Friend,
The Alien C.W.

265. Phrases

“Hey,” C..W. yelled at me, “come here.”

“What’s up?” I said as I walked into the room and found the old comedian Jack Benny staring at me from my computer.

“You have some explaining to do.”

“Really?” I said, “The last time we talked you said I couldn’t explain to a snake how to do the rhumba.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, deadpanning like the old trooper he whose shape he had borrowed. “You and the snakes seem to have learned a lot from one another.”

I ignored him, “You had a question?”

“About your language,” he said.

“The language of Shakespeare and Milton?”

“No,” he said, “the language of Kohen and Tymber.”

“Oh,” I said, “modern usage.”

“Quite so,” he said. He looked at the computer screen, “Here’s a dandy,” he said. “What, exactly, does it mean when a man posts an announcement on VisageDocument that ‘We’re pregnant,’ referring to him and his wife.”

“Uh,” I said, “I think it means he wants his friends on Facebook to know that he and his wife are going to prudence a child.”

“It takes two of them?”

“In the fertilization phase, yes.”

“So the man fertilizes himself as well?”

“Not exactly.”

“The man carries a portion of the gestation assemblage to term? Shares the discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth?”

“Not exactly.”

“So what does he mean when he says, ‘We’re pregnant,’ as if it were a joint activity?”

“How the hell should I know,” I said. “When I was a kid, we weren’t even allowed to use that word. A woman was ‘expecting,’”

“Expecting what?”

The Falloonian Elders have been concerned
about overpopulation on your planet.
I think I've found the solution. - C.W.

“A child, although that was never made clear to us. Sometimes we were told it was a puppy.”

“You are a strange species,” he said. “I suppose you had incomprehensible euphemisms for other biological functions?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, we did ask if we might go ‘wash,’ if we needed to …” I struggled for the words.

“To do what?”

"Number One or Number Two,” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

I explained. He shook his head and then stared at me with another of his blank expressions.

“Oh, good grief,” he said. “And I thought you got to be such a dope all on your own.”

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Finally, buy Big Dope's book so he'll shut up about it.
- C.W.

Available at major on-line retailers, or
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Shopping

Dear Friends and Followers:

Big Dope took me to shopping with him yesterday and I came back more confused about your species than ever, to wit:

1. Every Falloonian teenager knows that bleach is one of those unique substances that cannot be altered. The compound is either bleach or it isn’t bleach. Any attempt at altering it results in a compound that is no longer bleach. So why, I ask, are there multiple brands with a great range of prices?

2. I have read where the standards for importing or producing vodka in the United States are simple and straightforward. It must be colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Someone please explain to me why there are so many offerings and why some are so much more expensive than others.

3. Isn’t a person with access to a public and regulated water system who buys bottled water a bit like a person with a sexy and willing spouse who goes to a brothel?

Your Friend C.W.