Coincidences, Thoughtful Touches and Google Slides
Why is Google Slides so bad? Why was this email sent at 18:03 on 18/03/2022?
I’m sending this email at 18:03 on 18/03/2022. How remarkable!
There is something about coincidences. Something funny and delightful and unusual and magical. It’s like a bit of fantasy leaking into the real world. You look at the clock and see it is 34 minutes past 12. The numbers are consecutive! It’s like a sign. Of what, is less clear. But still: it’s a sign!
In What You Are Going Through, Sigrid Nunez remarks:
I tap my phone, which is sitting on top of a book on my desk, which happens to be Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04, and see that the time is 10:04.
Reading about a new movie while holding the cat against my shoulder. At the instant I come to the word vampire, the cat, which has never bitten me before, sinks its teeth in my neck.
On Columbus Day I see that my checking account balance is exactly $1,492.
It’s not so much that these, and patterns like them, are coincidences, but they are patterns. They are the world synchronizing with itself. Looking at the clock and seeing it’s 2:22 isn’t a coincidence, but it’s something more than just telling the time. It’s nature repeating itself. Perhaps it’s nature delighting us. It’s a little treat. I can’t help thinking that even the glummest and miserly of us processes a flicker of amusement from seeing one of these patterns pop up unbidden.
At university, a friend of mine (who, in hindsight, I suspect had an undiagnosed case of obsessive-compulsive disorder) used to clap every time one of these happened to “round them off”. I’d find her at 1:23 clapping seven times to “get it up to 1:30” before she could carry on.
What is it about these numbers? They prompt responses in us, even if the responses are inconsistent: I find them delightful, but she found them distressing. I don’t remember if Nunez has a conclusion in her book. I think she simply remarks that these patterns exist and prompt feelings in her.
The human brain, of course, is remarkably good at spotting patterns, even where they don’t exist. A couple of years ago I wrote an article about why we think that our phones are secretly listening to us when we mention something and then a few minutes later see an advert for it.
Twice now I’ve found myself doing little tests. “Man, I’d sure love a holiday in the Bahamas,” I say out loud to no one, my phone resting on the side with the Facebook app open. “Gosh, my car insurance is expensive. Would be real great if someone could find a cheaper quote.” Nothing. I feel silly. But still, the next day, I look at each ad with renewed suspicion. Journalists, smart journalists who debunk conspiracies, are lured into these too. New Statesman ran a similar (and equally unscientific) study to mine.
Of course, our devices aren’t listening to us. You don’t have to think about it much to realize how ludicrous the suggestion is. Siri can barely set a timer when I very clearly instruct it to do so in my polite telephone voice. There aren’t Gene Hackman-esque, head-phone-clad figures listening to our conversations and thinking “ah, they mentioned broccoli: deploy the vegetable adverts.” The scales and technology just don’t work.
And yet, at the foot of my article, the comments were filled with people telling me I was definitely wrong, and they had an example that couldn’t be explained away by coincidence - or by any of the other more believable technologies at play (for example, searching for ‘electric car range’ and shortly after getting advert for Teslas).
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” every detective on every TV show says. And indeed, as I was thinking about the joy (and fear) of coincidences, I turned on an episode of NCIS and Gibbs says exactly this. That surely gets double coincidence points. A coincidence wrapped in a synchronicity. On a detective show, this trait seems admirable. He doesn’t believe in coincidences, so he tracks down the truth. But in the real world, there are coincidences everywhere. When Gibbs looks at his phone and notices it’s 2:22 on 2nd February, does he really not believe that happened by chance?
In How to Write a Novel Nathan Bransford has a chapter called “Why your job is harder than God’s”. Coincidences don’t exist in fiction. If an inhaler was left at the scene of the crime, the murderer is the person with asthma. In real life - not so much. Coincidences are all around us. Maybe you were thinking about them just as this email dropped in.
Unlike Gibbs, I do believe in coincidences. And I sort of love them.
Elsewhere
1. On the subject of loving tiny things: what does it mean to “love” something on the internet as opposed to just liking it? What does it mean when we “like” something on Facebook or Twitter. We’re saying to our followers “This is worth your time. (But me, I’m on to the next thing.)”
About ten years ago, Robin Sloan made an app called Fish: a tap essay. It’s an app, but it’s also a sort of a single article, presented as a PowerPoint pack that you tap your way through.
Maybe that’s a reasonable definition of love on the internet or anywhere: to love is to return. I don’t know about you… but on the internet, I don’t return to much. Instead it’s one thing after another. Our attention is sometimes well-directed, sometimes not but either way, it’s like a flashlight beam whipping around the room. Never resting. Never returning.
I’m a great believer in form and function working together to support each other. This app or essay or article or whatever you call it is striking, partly because it’s so different. It’s a fully native iOS app for a single essay. Clearly, this doesn’t scale. Every article we read can’t be a single app, can’t take up a precious tile on our phone screens. And really, the content here could be rendered in a slideshow, or on a website. But the app-ness of it, makes it stickier for me. I like this article (I might even love it) and so I don’t want to remove it from my iPad. And so it sits there. And so I return to it.
2. In fact, let’s go 2 for 2 on essays presented in atypical ways, here’s a Google slides pack about writing marketing copy. What’s most fun about this is that it distills marketing down into 7 options:
Pick an emotion
Pick a plot
Pick a vantage point
Pick an enemy
Speak like a fan
Break a taboo
Evoke a time and a place
A well-argued guide with some fun examples. (While on the subject of Google Slides, it would be remiss of me not to link to this scathing takedown of its UX. Google Slides is a dumpster fire and I’m amazed anyone manages to make anything in it.)
3. You know what never seems to go viral? Local News. It’s all mainstream content platforms pushing out big features - Vice, Vox, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and so on. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this article from the Birmingham Mail doing the rounds. It’s a little story about someone going to a Michelin starred restaurant. But what’s endearing about it is the way she delights in the small things:
The restaurant itself was beautiful, fairly formal but with no crisp table cloths to be seen. I was shown to a table with one chair and noted what a lovely touch that was. An empty chair can be a bit depressing when you're alone. It indicates that someone could be there, but they're not. Adams just got rid of it entirely.
It was the first of dozens of sweet little gestures that made me feel like the most cherished person in the gaff. The second came almost immediately. Two menus showing only the vegetarian food options - they'd noted it down when I called and made sure that I didn't even have to think about it, or remind them. I never get that service in Nandos, and I've been there a million times.
It’s not just lovely that the restaurant thought of these things, but it’s lovely that she noticed them to and remarked on them. It gives me a warm feeling inside.
That’s all for this issue. Until next time,
Simon