Dept. of Minor Observations
A repository of bulletins, field reports, working papers, and notices concerning small thoughts, odd details, internet archaeology, abandoned drafts, and gentle critiques of modern digital culture. Items are classified, stamped, and filed accordingly.
Notice to readers of "Best Practices" documentation
The Department has observed that the phrase "best practice" appears with high frequency in technical documentation, style guides and internal memos.
Readers are advised that this phrase reliably indicates one of the following:
1. Practices that were considered reasonable by the author at the time of writing.
2. Practices that were favoured at the author's previous employer.
3. Practices that were immediately adopted to avoid a specific past incident that no one wishes to discuss.
4. No specific practice at all, but written with a strong conviction that there ought to be one.
The Department recommends asking which of the above choices applies before adopting the practice in question.
On the persistence of the fax number
A significant number of institutional, medical, and legal forms still
contain a field for a fax number. The fax machine has not been common
in domestic use for over two decades. Many, if not most, offices no longer own one.
Yet the field remains. In some places, a fax number is even legally required
for certain submissions. In others, the form was designed when fax
numbers were common and has not been updated because the form still works,
in the sense that all the other fields still apply.
The Department observes how long administrative forms can outlast the
technologies they were designed to accommodate with a high degree of regularity.
The field persists as a kind of fossil — evidence of an earlier
environment, preserved in the sediment of a PDF that no one has
opened to edit since 2009.
Notice on the use of the word "Journey"
The Department formally registers its observations on the word "journey"
in its application to the act of purchasing software, completing an onboarding
form or selecting a subscription tier.
A journey implies distance, difficulty and a possibility of never
returning. The Department does not dispute that enterprise procurement
can be difficult. It disputes that difficulty of this kind constitutes
a journey in any useful meaningful sense of the word.
The Department suggests "procedure", "process," "experience," and, where
appropriate, "ordeal."
On the persistence of the "Any Key"
The instruction "press any key to continue" was common in software of
the 1980s and 1990s. The "any key" does not exist as a labelled key on
any keyboard produced before or since.
The instruction persisted for decades. People would press Enter, or Space,
or sometimes A, having decided that A was close enough to "any." The
instruction was technically correct and practically confusing and
nobody changed it because it worked.
The Department notes this as a case study in interface language that
is accurate without being in any way helpful, and wonders how many such cases
remain in current production systems, unexamined because they also,
broadly, work.