Did I tell you about “recalcitrant”?<\/p>\n
Over a decade ago, I was having a conference call with Audible, I’d been working with them for a few weeks, maybe a month.<\/p>\n
Small aside: Audible’s hold “music” is the audio book of Charlotte’s Web. I was always a little sad when a meeting actually started. LeapFrog had the second best hold music: children’s singalong songs… meetings often started with people trailing off their singing as the music cut off.<\/p>\n
For this status meeting, I had three or four tasks and had not finished the highest priority one, instead finishing the others. I said that the tough one was being recalcitrant. I was hoping to avoid getting into the details because I knew there was a memory leak and that it was deep in the way the operating system works. I rapidly went on to the completed tasks so I portray it all very positively.<\/p>\n
When I finished my spiel, one of the guys on the phone (who were all smart and exactly what you’d expect from Audible-before-bought-by-Amazon engineers)… one of the guys asked “what do you mean by recalcitrant?” so I went ahead and explained that I knew the symptoms and would figure it out soon. I apologized for not getting it done, I acknowledged it was the highest priority and I would get it done quickly. You know, I was really trying to be a professional. It was my first contract gig.<\/p>\n
Same guy (name redacted to protect a super nice guy) said, “No, what do you mean by recalcitrant?”<\/p>\n
There was a long pause, I didn’t know what he meant.<\/p>\n
I mispronounce many, many words. I think all readers have this problem. Let’s just say “impugned” does not have a hard-g sound something I found that out a month or two ago when my husband near fell in the parking lot of the library as he was laughing too hard to see.<\/p>\n
I was pretty sure: re-kal-si-trant. But knowing me, I went ahead and spelled it. And asked if I was saying it wrong. I was so embarrassed but I didn’t want them to think I wasn’t willing to learn from them. Same guy says “But what does it mean?”<\/p>\n
Not sure if he was yanking my chain but too busy pretending to be professional to get annoyed, I said it meant that the code was being fussy.<\/p>\n
He asked if “recalcitrant” meant “fussy” and so I clue in that he’s simply asking for a definition. And so I go into teacher mode (why?) and said, not exactly, that recalcitrant means uncooperative and copping an attitude. I start in on the etymology (aren’t etymologies the coolest thing?).<\/p>\n
Then I remember that my goal was to give my status and shut up. So I eventually shut up. The Audible guy thanks me for a new vocabulary word and we finally move on to the next person’s status report.<\/p>\n
I have always wondered what everyone else on that conference call thought of that whole adventure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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