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The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of
by jefe_ 6y ago
The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of thousands of e-mails into the Nordstrom Rack Nordy Rewards program, and he had seen it all, but this, this was something entirely new. This wasn't the single letter username or the overly sexual address or the gmail address with the plus sign, all mildly interesting but within the bounds of what was possible. What was normal. What was sane. This was something entirely new. The point of sale workstation has no key for the lightbulb emoji. This was the predicament. But if an emoji can be an e-mail address, maybe some other part of the computer can be a keyboard. Maybe the floor can be a table. Maybe hands can be screwdrivers. The clerk began touching the screen. Pawing at the sides of the monitor. He began mumbling as he moved his attention to the receipt printer, ripping it open, 'there's gotta be an emoji button in here somewhere.' As his search intensified, so too did the stares of customers waiting in line. In a final effort the clerk hoisted the register above his head before smashing it on the ground, bringing himself down with the machine. Associates had pooled around their coworker and were urging calm. Emergency Services had been notified and were en route, and slowly the chaos turned to calm. An associate reached out to ask the customer if she could finish ringing him up on another register. 'Sure,' he replied, 'but this time let's just use my gmail address.'
- gottavomment 6y agoThis is art. I worked as a cashier for a couple years, and this feels like a fever dream about those days.
- ethbr0 6y agoSample size dichotomy. From a customer's perspective, this is the way everyone does things. (Sample size: themselves) From a cashier's perspective, this weirdo is a few standard deviations outside the mean. (Sample size: 1,000+ customers)
- duiker101 6y agoI use an email address that ends in .io and the amount of people that still ask me ".io? are you sure that's correct?" never ceases to amaze me.
- gadders 6y agoMine ends in .by as my surname does as well and people still say "Is that it?" EG if my surname was "Gummersby" my email domain is "Gummers.by"
- lorenzhs 6y agoIf your surname contains an "a", say Gaddersby, you could also do "g@dders.by" to confuse people even more
- codethief 6y agoTry spelling that, though. :)
- maratc 6y agoI have purchased some domains for myself and my friends based on that rule, like rubinste.in, fedorovi.ch, or oba.ma (not real names). They thought it's cute but didn't hold them for long. A friend with a last name that ends in ..skova wasn't so lucky as Vatican doesn't sell domain names.
- tadzik_ 6y agoHell, booking.com will even tell you that "your address looks incorrect" (sometimes, I got it once out of two bookings made on a single day), if you dare to use your own domain .com. They used to nag me about "ohh, are you sure it's not tadzik_@gmail.com"? And I'm not sure what's worse.
- tyingq 6y agoIt does work well. I used a customized version of https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck on an ecomm website and the amount of bounces due to typos went way down. It is important to tune it a bit based on what you see after installing it to reduce the amount of bad suggestions.
- kozak 6y agoBy the way, we already have an "emoji button" on our keyboards: on Windows, it's the Win+. keystroke. Try it if your Windows 10 is updated enough.
- scaladev 6y agoA couple of alternatives for Linux users. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IBus#Emoji_input https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IBus#Emoji_input The kitty terminal emulator supports this out of the box (it also works on two other platforms): https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty Ctrl+Shift+U opens a Unicode input panel with fuzzy search by symbol code or name.
- sphaerophoria 6y agoThere's also https://github.com/salty-horse/ibus-uniemoji https://github.com/salty-horse/ibus-uniemoji if you want something a little more interactive. I wrote https://github.com/sphaerophoria/ibus-memebox https://github.com/sphaerophoria/ibus-memebox for myself because I wasn't quite happy with the performance of any of the solutions I found.
- lights0123 6y agoGNOME has Ctrl+period.
- lbhdc 6y agoDoes it? I am in stock gnome and this shortcut isn't bound by default. What distro are you using?
- dcminter 6y agoI believe it has to be a GTK app - which almost none of the things I use on a daily basis are. Try in gedit or something like that. My daily drivers are IntelliJ, Firefox, Chrome, and Terminator so it's not super useful to me... :'(
- fennecfoxen 6y agoright, okay, robert@xn--ds8h.kz, got it. thanks, Punycode!
- vlunkr 6y agoCome to HN for the news, stay for the short fiction. Well done.
- devoutsalsa 6y ago>> Maybe the floor can be a table Why wouldn’t you throw stuff all over the floor. It’s the biggest shelf in the room.
- dmingod666 6y agoVery well written. Bill burr on his podcast was talking about, when he first discovered reddit. He couldn't understand what it was... He then realized later.. "it's a site for people that really like to type.. that's what it is.."
- danaliv 6y agoI like to think of Wikipedia as a site for people who like to correct other people.
- giantrobot 6y ago"Well actually..." given form.
- 29083011397778 6y agoI'd never actually tried to describe Reddit so succinctly; in the same vein as yours, maybe Reddit is just Jeopardy where every comment must be in the form of a correction. Perfectly accurate or not, I think the venn-diagram of "People unlikely to already know what Reddit is" overlaps heavily with "People who know and understand what Jeopardy is", making it an excellent analogy :)
- scrozier 6y agoOh, that cuts to the quick.
- ddingus 6y agoThis is brutal, and potent. Nicely done.
- anderspitman 6y agoOne of my favorite reddit shower thoughts: "Wikipedia built the biggest modern information hub using nothing but nerds' need to correct each other."
- 6y ago
- juliend2 6y agoThere should be a museum for those kinds of HN thread comments. This kind of prose is truly hilarious. Thank you.
- russfink 6y agoBrilliant!
- oxymoron 6y agoHaha. This is halfway between psychedelic and hyper realistic in a way that made me think of Thomas Pynchon.