Mistakes
Kia ora readers
This is just a quick note.
A couple of you have let me know that you’re finding little spelling or grammatical errors in my offerings, as in my last effort on Hectors dolphins. Some have also let me know that these mistakes are distracting or irritating for you. I must admit to this having hit a bit of a nerve, both because it’s a fair complaint and because there’s a fair bit in behind this.
The truth about this is that “I know”, and that it irritates me too. I recognise mistakes can look unprofessional and unserious. Certainly my preference would be to make none. And certainly in a professional context I would go to greater lengths to get rid of them.
Another aspect of the truth is that my computer isn’t recognising something. It no longer “sees” my printer. I bought the printer a few years back, but it needs software and a login with 2FA upon a password and some account I long since lost access to. When eventually I do get in, there’s trepidation, because in the past I’ve found the software often fails to drive the printer. And then there’s the ink: in several years of law I’ve smashed the printing very hard, and a $500 bill awaits.
Without the printer, like so many of you I am sure, I find it very hard to pick up mistakes, even with the help of a second pair of eyes. Printing failures have occasionally prefigured professional embarrassment.
Another aspect of the truth - probably borne of that embarrassment - is that I harbour a low-key, but real, resentment about a situation in which access to a machine I own is made “secure”, apparently for my own benefit. I didn’t ask for that security, and the way it is achieved also has a very low-key dehumanising quality. Cumulatively across devices, this has long since felt less than fully healthy: one feels asked to behave that little bit more like a machine all the time. Why are we asked to remember an HP Smart™ password four years on? Why is such recall assumed to be a reasonable ask of a human, just because it is of a machine? Should we really make it easier by offering the printer my biometric data? I’m not so sure about any of this.
Most often we have to accept these things, and certainly I’ll work through the printing issues when necessity comes with its demands. But sometimes, where there is a more humane, immediate and obvious alternative, it is open to us to lose patience with such things and just reject them.
Here and for now, there is one.
If mistakes irritate you, and you’re receiving this stuff through your email, try accessing it via the app or website. There you should find error-free and perhaps very lightly edited versions, or at least improved efforts: rest assured I do try to get mistakes out and do it as quickly as possible. It’s in the nature of things this takes time and is itself imperfect. FYI, in time, I imagine I’ll use that function for minor post-scripts or error correction too – and they’ll be clearly marked.
The final and most important part of the alternative, though, is to appeal to readers’ better human qualities. You you may have noticed that part of what I’m trying to offer are images about the technical legal or policy subjects under discussion. I’m doing that for many reasons. Partly because I believe the complexity in these areas is sometimes built to benefit some profession. Partly because the mode of analysis in my line of work is so often to focus on parts rather than their relationships, and to prefer a proliferation of parts – cogs and not gestalt, an inappropriate machine image.
Like me you may also have noticed that in serious visual art, there is seldom perfection; or that different playing of songs can be electric for their little foibles. While my offerings are not art, they do feature my own connections between issues others might find disparate. That does have what shows up for me as something like creative process. The thinking, too, is always going to be provisional and subject to iteration. In these circumstances, imperfection is to be expected. If the mistake doesn’t compromise the overall meaning, it might be possible to look at it in a different way.
So, now knowing now my position on mistakes, I invite readers first to accept my apologies for them, and for their inevitable low-key continuation. And second, instead of finding irritation with a small number of mistakes, I invite readers to find a generosity of spirit.
Many thanks
AB
21 June 2024