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Ian is taller than average, built like a husky energetic boy. He has a slightly loose tongue and lips, imprecise, and in moments of excitement one might notice (unkindly) them glistening more than usual with saliva from this loose-lippedness.

He came to moments of excitement easily, not lustily or knowingly, but with a good-natured panache all the same. I knew him at college; we hung out and drank beer and smoked pot together. We were part of the same crew that mostly socialized in each other's dorms (much cheaper than going out), and there were some dominant personalities (not me; not Ian) who spent most of that time playing asinine video games and “letting” us watch, insisting that what transpired was, in fact, fun. Even typing this out it's clear this was pretty miserable, but yeah; we were all pretty miserable in our own ways and this is how we hung out.

Ian was in Mather house, a 70s labyrinth that could have been truly Brutal if it had tried harder. His room, though, was quite comfy – all the rooms had at least one non-right angle wall, and his room featured two windows on a corner that both opened, making for great breezes (summer cooldown, conceal smoke, etc).

Ian was taller than average and when he was in his cups his eyes had a charming, faraway quality – simultaneously sharp and bright, like an Irish uncle with a joke on his mind, and sleepy and faraway, like Alec Baldwin if he was a good person.

Silhouette-wise, Ian was a little torso-heavy. Not overweight, but imbalanced. In Disney comics, there is often an innocuous, slightly vacant-and-aloof character called Gus – Gus is Donald's cousin and when he visits, he innocently/relentlessly eats, eventually clearing out all of Donald's food.

Ian had been sleeping poorly for a few weeks; he was dealing with some stress, and all of his friends were acting exactly the same as they always did.

I don't know how it happened exactly. In the dead of winter some dorms got really hot – they turn on the central heating and expect you to open windows, install window-fans, etc to regulate your temperature. Ian had a pretty robust box-fan setup that Wolf had contrived (one semester Wolf took fluid dynamics, and went around everyone's dorm weathersealing and installing fans so they could smoke anywhere and be confident the smoke would leave through a known (inoffensive, covert) route).

Ian woke up in the middle of the night and was sweat-hot. Well, he didn't wake up – he jerked out of bed and, semi-asleep, tried to rearrange the bedclothes so that he could sleep on cooler surfaces. In the process of this, he opened a normally-closed window, immediately creating a strong vortex in the room (the window had not been part of Wolf's air-management plan; opening it would drastically change the pressure differential he had created throughout the rest of the 7-room dorm). In this unexpected maelstrom, the half-asleep Ian had tried to flatten and re-puff a dorm pillow – it ripped neatly in half as he flapped it against his legs, pouring 2-3 gallons of down into the maelstrom. Ian was confusingly and thoroughly caught (still half-awake, quarter-sober) in a whirlwind of feathers.

We knew this had happened not because he volunteered this experience, but because the next day at lunch, he reached into his pocket for his ID and a tiny cloud of feathers followed his hand out of his pocket.

The feathers had been pervasively, thoroughly incorporated into his laundry. They would not go away with a simple washing, because they matted down and adhered to the insides of pockets when wet. Inevitably, when he wore a garment fresh from the laundry, every dig into a pocket would yield a curious, subtle puff of down. It was as if a witch had cursed him to always be in a cloud of feathers.

The crumpled-up note goes on at quite some length, explaining that the puffy head, radial stellate symmetry, and yellow stamen may look like the features of a dandelion, rest assured it is a rare orchid of top-quality and without peer. The note is signed twice, once with “Love from John” and once just “Danny (flower shop owner).”

My buddy Harold has recently been doing some HR work for the State Department, basically trying to clean up their filesystem and, in the process, harmonize like five different HRIS schemas. I meet him usually to give him a free joint he can parallel-smoke with me in these pandemic times, which I get from my delivery service (they are low-quality j's so I don't mind the loss, he digs the roller's technique and has asked me to relay that roller a bunch of questions but that's another remark for another time). Harold has been cleaning up a bunch of personnel records from the miscellaneous / special-contracts part of the Dept, so it's been a bit more spelunking and lore-gathering than usual in these database-cleanup gigs. So he told me about a person who he's only pieced together from some admittedly sketchy records, but it's inarguable, just from the volume of lawyers' complaints alone, that Twin does exist.

It seems Twin drove a big truck and he did not care what happened to it. He was hauling helium for the Department of Energy, and was the most dangerous man on the road. Every day was taco day.

Harold found all this because he was, technically, committing a federal crime: he was using non-sanctioned software to parse official government HR records. In his defense, the gig pretty much explicitly required oblique activity such as this – it was well-known and understood that Harold was to maintain plausible deniability after getting unlogged root access to the machines in question. And it wasn't a secret that he was trying out some handmade sketch/parser scripts he had found in an old home directory. But again, technically: federal crime to run unfudge-dirs-v3-final-v2.py in his particular situation.

Helium is pretty easy to transport, since it's a liquid in a relatively small volume of well-protected trailer space. Lots of times he would also take a load of puppies up in the front cab, running them from shelter to shelter as they reached capacity or otherwise failed to sustain the inexplicable increase in dog fertility we've seen on his route over the last 5 years. But I digress:

Things you do not want to mess with, or be seen messing with: * dogs that appear to be having fun, especially immature dogs i.e. puppies * lonely and/or discontent-looking men in command of a large, poorly-cleaned truck * Any super-cooled, energetic-release type of trailer load * the Department of Energy, in any form

He drove wildly, with a freedom and energy ordinary people would associate with mania. But people in the grip of a mania, manic people, do not generally eat tacos / access taco experiences at as high a level as the driver. The receipts were legendary, circulated among sub-branches of the GAO and, at times (times of dire need on the part of the country's energy systems, times necessitating all manner of blackbudget countermeasures) reaching even the Post Office union listserv in terms of lore and legend. No puppies were harmed in the course of his duties.

In his domain, roughly the Northeast of the US with much of Quebec and the Carolinas as well, there was no stretch of more than 70 miles or so for which he did not know the optimal navigation solution given a situation's time/velocity constraints and its demands in terms of Mexican or Tex-Mexican foods.

Not to say the exhaustiveness of the coverage of taco-knowledge was an important or laudatory point – it merits mention more to establish the length of time the driver had spent in the region, and also to subtly highlight the (in this author's opinion, startling) geographical diversity of the customer base of the Department of Energy's Hazardous-Hauling concern. In reality, there were only a few taco locations on the planet worthy of sustained attention, and they formed neat nicely-distributed Voronoi watersheds spanning the map of his domain. Someone claiming first-hand knowledge told Harold about how Twin had at times contemplated on his driving as a harmonious and altogether unequivocal “good” sign that he had chosen a wise way to spend his days. “Tally ho,” as they said in the fighter-jet bars.

Which is all to say, in part, that there was a special and indelible joy in his driving, a deeply absurd engagement with the full gamut of forces and consequence-type relationships in the universe. Swerving wildly across lanes and even down off-ramps, all the time using the superfluid properties of his load to execute superb and alarming stunts. Cornering with a 45-foot bulk-isolated trailer in tow, when modeled in commercially-available physics engines, generally ends up looking like a demolition sequence shown in either fast- or slow-motion, but in real life it was truly balletic – Twin used the sloshing of the liquid helium to smartly “scoot” the back-end around into alignment at just the right moment on the apex of what was looking to be a total disaster of a turn, niftily lining up the body with the next straight shot out of the city. Any puppies present in the cab at the time would invariably get the zoomies.

Inevitably, when you are at the height of your form, you get some critics, your “peanut gallery”. Lots of people, watching a 40-ton tractor-trailer with matte black government plates powerslide across 8 lanes of outer Worcester SPUIE interchange, will think that somehow they are witnessing an excess. An excess that is literally “remarkable,” in that they call the police and remark upon it. This approach strikes us immediately as lacking in dignity, and we deplore it.

However, it is reasonable to wonder what becomes of those complaints! The number of the payload, and an exhortation to call if “my driving” isn't sufficient, are both clearly printed on the back of the truck. Inevitably, some number of critical comments are synchronously relayed to the internal Customer Success Program at the Department of Energy: this is where my buddy Harold has been able to clock the rough dynamics of Twin's hold on the system.

Just as there are a series of associable invoice entities in the oldest of the HRIS that Harold is working with, all of them basically “twin” references like Gemini Systems and Twin Systems; there are equally as many Customer Outcome Codes that appear to grant these programs unusual levels of access to the IVR system that routes Customer Success Opportunities (complaint calls) to various Customer Success Ninjas (DoE team, unsure where budget is allocated). Billing codes run the government, and this billing-code-sinkhole around Twin was difficult to ignore. And so.

The earliest record of a “twin” pun on a government procurement sheet is back in 1932, which is as far back as queryable records go.

Ambient Devices – Christmas hires and fires

Christmas (and the 2 weeks after) at Ambient was the rush season, when thousands of people would learn about how RF propagation works, and learn perhaps more than they intended about the business-prognosis of the pager-bandwidth airspace market at the time.

One Christmas was particularly heightened because it began with a bang – midway through December our entire building was evacuated due to an electrical fire that ultimately killed a technician. At the same time, Boston had some substantial snowfalls, which made temporary help harder to guarantee.

PG managed to get us into two contiguous suites in the hotel across the street, so he and Andrew borrowed a van and rustled up the necessary folding chairs and tables to make a rudimentary call center with – AB spent most of a night setting up the PBX system that would let us route calls form the 800 number to the suites. It looked, and this would become relevant later, like a classic boiler room / pump-and-dump setup.

We often had to hire temps, which was difficult because our support task went deeper than most CSR temp roles – the standard role was basically a human who would help customers through a phone tree or debug tree, and that's about it. Because of how returns work, and because the product was often given as a gift, there was an extra stage of customer-education we had to go through in order to get a customer to believe us when we said that their device was not broken, but it also would never work at their home (because it was not in an area covered by the pager network).

I spent perhaps more time than was needed explaining the actual mechanics of the situation to each CSR, possibly because I was ashamed to know-but-not-reveal how unanimously the verdict (“out of luck”) would be dispensed each day.

One of the temps was a gregarious dude who resembled Cedric Yarbrough (Jonsey in Reno 911), and would make a point to hold your eye contact while he was “expertly” handling a customer for us. He liked to emphasize frequently that we were his customer, and how much he was doing to elegantly serve the callers because that seemed to be the best way to flatter us into compliance. But he also loved sports! So much so that he would often mime sports-actions (lining up a golf swing; being hut-hutted the football) in concert with the dynamics of the phone conversation he was having on his earset. Most unsettling was football and other multi-player sports because if you failed to shake his eye contact, he would continue to involve you in the ghost-sport – you'd be on the hook to catch his pass or field his homer. I fantasized, but never found out, what would happen if you suddenly inverted the game, fumbling the catch or complicating the situation.

The manifestation of this was that you could easily lose double-digit minutes deftly managing eye contact with the various temps on the floor at any point – implicated at every step of the way in the drama you'd staged.

The Regret Intent

Systems that offer grace / forgiveness will have to communicate clearly the kinds of correction they will afford, and the depth of those corrections.

How does a system communicate (through its design, its affect, its documentation, etc) where and how these kinds of forgiveness are available?

This post is just a note-to-myself about a possible direction you could go in answering this question. The direction proposed is basically a structured interaction in which the person volunteers “I regret yesterday,” and the system goes from there: “Here are the things I can alter from yesterday. Shall I delete them? Rewrite them to spoofed, characteristic activity instead of specifics? Should I “blur” the records and make them less accurate?”

The goal here is to work towards systems we can trust to accommodate us in this open, accepting, and confidential way; I don't engage here with the kinds of regret or what situation might result in a regret utterance but I am sure you can imagine some of your own.

As a simple example, let's look at the Undo function as a rough shorthand for a personal intent expressed as “I regret my last action in this software context.” Here, the depth-of-correction is the number of separate Undo actions that the system will be able to perform. The breadth-of-correction is the set of verbs that are undo-able.

For a more complex example, think of “I regret hosting Donald yesterday.” Do we erase his IMEI/MAC info from our router's logs? Do we blur or clobber DropCam/Nest/IP_camera records?

I frame this as “regret –> forgiveness” specifically because I don't want a system to take these actions on its own, or to make its own conclusions about the intended depth of a correction – I want people who use the system to be able to trust that they understand which actions are permanent, and which are negotiable.

What is a graceful system? I will try to explain here, but like the concept of grace itself, it naturally evades neat categorization.

I think of the interactions and systems I design from the perspective of a host – in compiling this (incomplete, developing) list of thoughts, I'm trying to call out what constitutes a successful visit, what endures after departure, what the essential duties/functions of a host are in a particular context.

Humans

Graceful systems operate with an understanding that humans necessarily imbue an interaction with uncertainty and risk. On the human side of this encounter, a graceful system accepts the person as they are, and requires little in the way of contortion to use the system. (And by contortion I don't mean every system must have fully-conversational speech recognition, I just mean that it is reasonable, and feels fine, to use the system: setting a specific temperature on a kettle can be fine if I'm just turning a dial, but it feels like a contortion when it becomes a chore, involving pairing wifi or giving away usage info, etc).

On the computer side, a graceful system eschews the record-everything approach currently used to hedge the maker's bets and easily afford

ambiguity and the implicit One way a graceful system might acknowledge this risk would be to embrace ambiguity in places traditionally left explicit

Forgetting

A great deal of human interactions and relationships depend critically on

Forgiving

Notes and briefs re: Graceful Systems

Graceful Systems are designed with hospitality and decency in mind – they are systems that forgive and forget. This site will be where I collect and refine the concept of a graceful system.

The writing will assume you are like me, a person who interacts with a large number of technologically-mediated systems every day, and who thinks about the design intentions behind those everyday systems. The ways by which these everyday systems can be made profitable, efficient, permanent, and indelible are well-studied; they are not of interest here.

Instead, we look to the fundamental experiences that make being a human unique—sharing a joke, ignoring a fart, forgetting a face—these elements of magnanimity and grace that we effortlessly provide for each those we care for. Let's start from there, and see how we can re-think some of the habits we accumulated on the way to the here and now.