Humour

The virtue of vagueness

T A Balasubramanian on the trick of providing professional observations in a hazy manner.

Doling out more off-the-cuff suggestions, spoofy tales and outrageous wisdom, Dr Don Jong is back doing his favorite thing, gliding into the wonderous maze that is the mind of Bobo Jitter, the perpetually pondering CIO of Bazooka Company. Nicknamed the ‘Oddfather’ because of the questionable interventions that he comes up with, Dr Jong has a dynamic proclivity for tackling the cyberworld’s baffling bylanes.

“I am at my wit’s end, Doc. El Gizmo, my project team leader, has been writing reports about his projects that are anything but outstanding examples of clarity.”

“And why is that troubling you so much?”

“Listen to this—‘the proposed system will support all of the concepts outlined in the supplied requirements documentation, and we are reasonably certain that the suggested software will bring substantial benefits to Bazooka for years to come.’ Tell me, does it inspire confidence?”

“I would not know. What exactly is missing?”

“Missing? It misses just about everything on the project, Doc. Look at that sentence. It tells me nothing and makes no commitments. When will this system support the ‘concepts’? Who knows? And anyway what does ‘support’ mean? How does a system actually ‘support’ a ‘concept’? What is ‘reasonably certain’? What is ‘suggested’ software? What the heck is a ‘substantial’ benefit? And how many ‘years’ are to come when they come?”

“I guess it means that El Gizmo will do whatever he considers necessary to provide what he understands this Bazooka user or department requires?”

“Ah, but it is the persistent vagueness that makes El Gizmo so infuriating. We are talking about software projects here, not economic theory, Doc. Let me translate it into your professional mode. Maybe that will convey to you my frustration. What if you were to tell me or one of your patients that ‘the proposed treatment will support all of the discussed measures outlined in our first session, and we are reasonably certain that our future sessions will bring substantial relief to you for years to come.’ Would you give me such a document?”

“Hmm, of course, yes. It sounds very good, my boy. We doctors are never sure of the outcome of what we prescribe, medical science and psychiatry being more a gamble than a precise science. We like to discuss our intended plans with our patients and couch our professional observations in a generally cloudy way. It would be a pleasure to offer you such a hazy, but perfectly courteous document, since it does nothing to compromise me.”

“You see? It is precisely this kind of obfuscation that is making me nervous. El Gizmo has become a slippery eel, focused upon never getting nailed for not delivering something that was in the specification.”

“Well, Bobo, you need to admire him, at the very least. He has discovered the great secret of business management, otherwise called ‘productive waffling’. He has mastered the art of writing airy technical documentation so as to make it sound both friendly and positive, while at the same time never exposing himself to the accusation that he might have to deliver something exactly as requested.”

“Come on Doc, we have to consider the needs of our users and give them precise solutions that work exactly the way they expect it. Is that not what we are being paid for at Bazooka?”

“Bobo, wake up. If you are bent upon giving users what they ask for, you are going to be in deep trouble. Let me tell you about my experience with one gizmo so that you do not ever again get unduly inspired to provide customers what they keep asking for.”

“Seems queer to me, Doc. But tell me, anyway.”

“Well, the remote control on my new high definition television set has about 100 buttons, many of them with multiple characters and arrows printed on them, and sometimes all around them in various colors. My wife and I have to undergo great mental torture every time we want to turn the TV set on, adjust the volume or change channels. My wife wanted to know if I could make the remote for our old TV work on the new set. Guess what is on the old remote? Five buttons: power, channel up and down, and volume up and down. Guess which buttons we use on the new 100-button remote?”

“The same old five buttons?”

“Exactly. We managed to relocate those after many weeks of intense struggle. Now, I can imagine that the maker of the 100-button remote control might have been a good-natured kindly person like you, Bobo. Very concerned about providing his TV customers with every single control function they might have wished for. He might have been adding more and more functions because he thought he was being paid for it. Maybe there are buttons to whistle for the dog, or answer the doorbell with a pre-recorded announcement.  Who knows what others might have dreamed of? The remote, incidentally, comes with a handy 30-page operating manual which goes to great lengths to explain each button’s function in excruciating detail, with illustrations to show how one might press an arrow key in nine different directions.”

“Wow, Doc. You must be the envy of the neighbourhood.”

“Of course. You must see the look on Dr Doolittle’s face when I wave the remote in his face with a flourish when he drops by.  And yet, when we use it in our living room, that very object of envy turns into a private nightmare of non-utility. But the point is this—just imagine if it had been El Gizmo handling the project. From what you have told me, he would have been ready with a perfectly nebulous document of specifications for the remote that would make the users—such as me and my wife—feel all warm and fuzzy without tying himself down to anything like the number of buttons he would be having in his final design.”

“You’re right, Doc. He would have probably found a way to reduce the old five-button version to a one-button model, too. Though, of course, he would never have stated that as an objective.”

“Instead, he would probably have said something like—‘since a host of options do not necessarily make an interface user-friendly, it has been found convenient to conceive of a state-of-the-art minimalist design that would adequately meet the customer’s requirements’—eh?”

“Indeed, Doc. If anyone can think up a way to turn 100 specifications into one, or even none, and come up with the ultimate smoke-and-mirrors document where no real information changes hands, it has to be El Gizmo, the nebulous. He will ensure that there are no clear answers to the is-it-or-is-not-it, does-it-or-does-it-not and will-it-or-will-it-not questions. He will draw diagrams with lots of little boxes with arrows swarming around them in loops. He will also sprinkle the text with a whole host of approximations and ponderous adjectives that add weight without substance.”

“Voila! It is El Gizmo who is teaching you the joy of creating vaporware—and the art of making customers happy—by eliminating all the rubbish they keep asking for. One notes that you have stumbled upon the commendable virtue of vagueness, at last, my boy. Never forget to put as much distance between you and what you are saying as possible.”