Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

Another day made of words: in the morning, a worker asks for a better word for “accompany,” as in “Our staff will accompany you in installing the product.” Assist? “Yes. Assist. That is the word. Assist.” In the afternoon, someone wants to know if the screen should say that a line can have “many” or “several” asterisks in it. Multiple? “OK.” Someone else asks if “subset” means “substitute.” I hold my hands in the air, facing each other. Here’s a set of things. I bring my right hand closer to my left. I chop the air, swipe imagined objects away with the back of my right hand, then move the hand back to where I had chopped. I move my hands, and the objects that would be between them, closer to him. These are a subset. “OK, got it.” At the end of the day, the boss and I talk about the American election. I tell him what I’ve heard about the odds of each candidate winning. He doesn’t know the English word “odds.” I tell him that it’s the ratio of the probability of one outcome over another. He understands that. We talk about gambling and the stock market. I tell him how I used to walk down an alley off Wall Street at lunchtime when I worked there, through a throng of men in suits, all getting stoned. He asks if they were just smoking marijuana. Well, that’s all that I could smell there. That and aftershave. He hollers for another worker to stop what he’s doing and come to his office. He announces, officially, that he will now tell a joke. It’s a long intricate story about a Yiddish speaking parrot, with a punchline referring to probability. It’s quite funny. We laugh. “And now I know that I will remember the word ‘odds.’”