Alex Bain's Blog

HBS Comment etiquette

I really REALLY hate when people speak with their eyes closed, and some of the worst offenders are my classmates.

Before some of the worst classroom comments I hear, I see the person shut their lids and say something pretentious like, "What I think everyone here is missing is..."

No one at this school is so smart that they should ever be acting like anything's obvious or like class is a waste of their time.

Rubber baby buggy bumpers

Why aren't cars bumpers made of rubber anymore? I can think of three reasons:

1. People don't like the way they look. I never minded the way rubber looked. Check out this '72 Porsche here. They've figured out a nifty way to work rubber into the bumper without it ruining the clean lines of the car.
2. They were heavy and hurt fuel mileage. This might be true. I wouldn't know. I know this though: rear spoilers help mileage, but they usually look incredibly cheesy, so most people don't have them. If people were so concerned with mileage, cars would look very different from their current form.
3. Dealers prefer fender-benders to leave lasting scars so that they can charge crazy sums for replacement parts. This seems to be the most logical explanation. Damn dealers and manufacturers for artificially making the total cost of ownership much higher.

We had a little fender-bender a week ago, where a cab suddenly changed two lanes without warning and clipped the front right of our car. This happened in what is probably Boston's trickiest intersection. The cab driver actually got out and tried to argue it was somehow our fault. He got about one sentence into his case when a nearby construction worker called out to the driver: "You cut her off, don't even botha [sic]. The whole thing was yoah [sic] fault."

The damage was minimal, but I can't help but think we wouldn't have even needed to get out of our cars and talk about it if most cars still were bracketed by rubber.

3 things that aren't funny

1. Men pretending to be women - Example: Beach Blanket Babylon in San Francisco, Actor Dame Edna, 80% of what happened on the show Whose Line is it Anyway? (especially the stuff with Wayne Brady)
2. Jokes that start with "I thought you said" - Example: "Oh, you said 'I need some milk', I thought you said 'I'm wearing silk.'"
3. Pranks - Example: Radio shows that make prank phone calls, 40% of what they did on the show Jackass (when they weren't performing "stunts")

What bothers me about airports

In some airports (e.g. Boston, Vegas) you need to show your boarding pass twice. Once to enter the security line, & once to exit the line. In most places they've consolidated the two tasks.

It bothers me that I have to go through the inconvenience of showing it twice, but it bugs me even more when the security agents at act as though their local rules are self-evident.

In Fort Meyers, you can't put your shoes in the x-ray bins. They say this is for cleanliness reasons. Fine, but then they treat everyone who's not aware of the rule like a suspected terrorist. They also have some unusual interpretation of the "no fluids" rule that I didn't understand.

Maybe we should have a giant sign over each airport security checkpoint that lists national rules & local rules in 2 distinct categories. This would help travelers know how to behave & keep the security workers from acting like all travelers are idiots.

Add this to my list of ways to improve airports.

Misused

Here's two words that I frequently hear used incorrectly and it drives me insane:

1. Factoid: This word is often used to refer to a clever piece of trivia, but just because that use is common doesn't mean it's right. This word did not even exist until '73, and it has a very specific meaning. In the same way that a humanoid is something that seems human, and a planetoid is something that looks like a planet, a factoid is something that seems like a fact, but is it. I believe the term was originally used in reference to Marilyn Monroe being an orphan. The belief was so widely held, it was thought to be true... but it wasn't
2. Unique: Uniqueness is like pregnancy in that it's a binary situation. You can't be "sort of" pregnant. A comedian can't be "kind of" unique. For some reason, I see this misused most in interviews with people in entertainment (TV, movies, etc.)