[James' Reply: The phrase is used by bullies to intimidate, by dilettantes to impress, by cowards as a shield, or by the apathetic because they copy and paste their words from the surrounding landscape.]

I have to meet with a consultant on Monday who was hired by an arts organization I work with. She already spent one of the two hours she’s being paid for telling me what we could do in the second hour, though there was no earthly reason we could not settle down and do the actual work during the first hour. I’ll bet there are consultants who give valuable information to their client organizations, but I haven’t met one yet. So far I’ve only encountered people who can talk about talking about work, which takes time from actually working or learning. I know that’s not what your post is about, but it seems this phrase is part of a layer of jargon that is not about actually getting work done or gaining valuable insight into how to work better. When I asked myself what would take the place of “best practices,” I thought, “learning a skill.” I actually googled “best practices + bullshit” to see if anyone else was bothered by this phrase–that’s how I came across your article.

Plus, there’s something ugly grammatically about saying, “it’s a best practice.”

[James' Reply: Thanks for stopping by.]

I just came across the videos on Buccaneer-Scholar website. I think Erika should add a few of those to the video page as well – especially the one where you and Jon select books from your bookshelf and have 8 or so hours to make a presentation. Very fun!

[James' Reply: The bibliography is a work in progress. I've come up with a system of tags. I'm now tagging all the books in the bibliography. Next I must write capsule reviews. And THEN we will formally replace the existing bibliography with the new one.

Yeah, I think you're right about the videos.]

[James' Reply: Actually... I didn't realize until you mentioned that how that was the depressing moment for me, too. It's not the realization that this was a scammer, but rather that this was such a dimwitted one. I was trying to set up a battle of wits, or at least to feel seduced. She didn't have anything close to the patience and skill that I was hoping to witness.

It is possible to scam me. I know this because I have had friends to whom I would have given substantial sums of money, who later turned out not to at all to be the friends I thought they were. I can be scammed, it just take some months to gain my trust. And here "Irene" is acting like I'm an ATM machine that dispenses money to without a pin.]

how do you come to the conclusion that she is too innocent and sees only the good in people after she said that she didn’t know why she hadn’t revealed her motive to get money from you from the very start of the conversation? Me thinks such people wouldn’t fear saying this from the start as “all people are mostly good” and they wouldn’t run after hearing/reading that. Besides, why go on a chat to ask for money? Unless she sees no good in people she meets on the streets.

[James' Reply: These are good points. Do you think I'm too trusting?]

I enjoyed reading this. I think the ultimate test was when you were the bearer of good news that she didn’t have to pay anything at all. A real person in such a situation would have probably been more positive because it opens more options. She was mad. Your good news/revelation for “Irene” meant she can’t ask you for money anymore. Money for what? Okey, for a new lawyer perhaps. Yet another flaw in “her” story is of the amount of gold she inherited. So she inherited only gold? Her father had over $300,000 worth of gold and no other assets? No house to sell to pay for this alleged storage fee? A more modest amount of gold would have made it more believable to me.

But the biggest giveaway was when she had no problem giving you the “whole gold” after all this trouble. I guess I wouldn’t have any problem giving somebody the whole gold either if it was floating in the air. But wait, first you get the whole gold for helping her but then she wants to sell and share the money? I would loved to hear the ending of this scam story, just to see who would really fool whom. Sharing and giving the whold gold is not the same. If she gave me the whole gold first, then why would I wanna share it later? It’s already mine. So obvious how she would say anything to trick people of money.

[James' Reply: There sure were a lot of holes (wholes?) in her story. I think that's one reason I wanted to post this-- just the sheer illogical, self-contradictory extreme of it. Like a product full of obvious bugs that a hopeful product manager thinks will get through acceptance testing.]

Also, as if it is that easy to transfer so much gold across border without being searched or asked questions. Sad that some people fall for such stories and actually give money.

Anyways it was fun and how she didn’t expect those questions and tips from you. Thanks for posting.

Regards,
Jasminka.

[James' Reply: That's the spirit!]

(Digression: I got a wonderful example of it in the physical mail a month or two ago from Tanzania. Beautiful stamps, interesting envelope, classic letter. A bravo performance.)

[James' Reply: Wow, PHYSICAL mail?]

The “I’m going to mess around with the bad-situation-in-Africa scammer and post the results” counter-tactic is not quite so old as to be cliche, but is certainly staring down at the ramp over the shark tank and gunning the engine.

[James' Reply: I think you're taking this a bit too seriously. You know, there are a whole lot of cliches happening on testing blogs all over our great land. Many of those cliches are actually damaging to the craft. This was something fun that I thought I would share. It marginally has to do with testing, and I notice my hit count goes way up when I try something humorous. And one single blog post about messing with tech support, in 2009, got 100 times the hits of any other post I've ever done.]

So at the point where I finished reading your interaction with “Irene” and your diagnosis of the result, I was, let’s say, 97% sure that you were messing with the bad-situation-in-Africa scammer and having a deadpan joke about the possibility that “Irene” is a real person in this real situation, probably as an indirect way to stir up some discussion about problem diagnosis, the risk of erroneous conclusions, some fun topics in black-box testing techniques, applied epistemology in general, and so on and so forth.

[James' Reply: 97% is pretty good. I'll take it.]

But — Andy Kaufman notwithstanding — deadpan can only go on so long before one wonders whether it really is deadpan.

[James' Reply: That's pretty much the point of deadpan. I admire Andy Kaufman. I still wonder a little if his death was part of the joke.]

So I’m going to sit back and observe your responses to these questions and see how long it takes me to determine whether you’re deadpanning or whether you really believe Irene is a real person stuck in a bad situation in Africa.

Yours in meta self-reference,
–JMike

[James' Reply: Fair enough. But I'm curious why the fact that I mentioned "419" isn't a complete giveaway?]

I keep on coming back to it time & time again. I give it to testers but usually I hand a copy to the developers. They complain at first and after they read it they go: “Hey, this is really a good idea….”.

Maybe you should re-work this into something more prominent & permanent on your site. I think it adds a lot of value.

I also find logging especially interesting from an automation perspective. I can have watchers on a log, that alert me if certain conditions that I want to know about occur (i.e. see if a defect has actually been resolved if there is doubt about the fix).

Tangentially this reminds me of a magazine article written by an insomniac who decided to become a telephone psychic so that he didn’t have to spend his late nights watching television advertisments for psychic phone services. When callers asked him for the winning lottery numbers, he’d say that he’d looked into their future and saw that they would never win the lottery and so they shouldn’t waste money on tickets. Despite the incredible accuracy of his prediction, this uniformly elicited the response that he was the worst psychic ever.

The whole thing is a scam. There is no Irene. This is a long standing scam, people ain India were spammed with this kind of email 2 years ago. All of them appear to originate from African countries. The sender is benefactor of a large inheritance and wishes to share it with the mail receipient, they would just need a small deposit to bypass the countries laws or whatever. Many people fell prey to this, it was in the papers too. In fact, my father received a mail like and was giving a serious thought to this, until I told him the facts.

A quick google search shows a trend.

http://www.fraudwatchers.org/forums/showthread.php?p=129792

-Keshav

[James' Reply: How can you say that there is no Irene? I was talking to her.]

Some of us know that 419 is the section of the nigerian penal code for fraud.

For the rest, there is google.