Blankface

A Blankface (credited to Scott Aaronson) is someone, usually a service worker entrusted with a small amount of power, who would rather use that power to act as a cog in a broken machine instead of a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions.

Blankfaces are almost always in a position to easily do the right thing and bend some minor rule or reach out to another department to get your inquiry resolved, but living otherwise powerless lives, they relish enforcing the most literal interpretation of the rules. These rules give them a semblance of power, and for them, taking ownership and doing the right thing feels like giving in to your demands—a loss of power.

Given a choice between doing the obviously right thing or stonewalling you to feel powerful, a Blankface will always choose the latter.

I never got the reimbursement they promised. Their Blankface administrator just kept sending me back the form, demanding more and more convoluted bank details, until I finally got the hint and dropped it.

memory swim

Making an effort to hop between fond, old memories in order to displace or squelch the vividness of one's current (likely depressing) situation. Must last for more than a minute to qualify as a swim.

Yeah, since he lost his job and his girl, he'll just leave the TV off and go on a memory swim.

Chinese room

Searle's Chinese room from Wikipedia:

In the Chinese room thought experiment, a person who understands no Chinese sits in a room into which written Chinese characters are passed. In the room there is also a book containing a complex set of rules (established ahead of time) to manipulate these characters, and pass other characters out of the room. This would be done on a rote basis, eg. "When you see character X, write character Y". The idea is that a Chinese-speaking interviewer would pass questions written in Chinese into the room, and the corresponding answers would come out of the room appearing from the outside as if there were a native Chinese speaker in the room. It is Searle's belief that such a system could indeed pass a Turing Test, yet the person who manipulated the symbols would obviously not understand Chinese any better than he did before entering the room.

To chinese room (verb) is to solve problems without understanding. Most commonly used while doing math or physics homework, chinese rooming involves combining equations from various pages to solve a problem without understanding the problem or the equations.

"I'm totally going to fail this test. I've been so busy that I've had to chinese room every homework this month."

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virtual raise

When contracting, rather than raising one's rate, instead billing more than necessary for work completed. Has the effect of increasing one's virtual hourly rate.

Did you get that big raise you were hoping for?
> Nah, so I just billed for more hours. Virtual raise!

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maximizer

One who maximizes whatever application he is working on, consuming all screen real estate and rendering the entire concept of the windowed GUI useless.

I told my friend I was getting a 30" monitor, but because he's a maximizer, he couldn't fathom the purpose of it. "Who wants to type in Microsoft Word across the whole screen?"

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livejournal

An online diary service which caters to those who believe they do not get the respect or recognition they feel they deserve in traditional social interaction. Users have the opportunity to showcase "the real them" and gather the affirmation they believe they deserve through the message board attached to each entry.

I used LiveJournal for a year before I realized I wasn't really an undiscovered genius and was actually just part of a commenting circle jerk.

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