> ‘It’s the forty-fifth month since we signed onto that hospital’s system and one has to change the password every month,’ Caroline replied.
Every month is a little aggressive of a timeline. Also, stop making users do your bizarre regex passwords.
* include caps
* include numbers
* include symbol
* eight charachters
* must be recursive backronym
Also, stop trying to keep password requirements secret. I am sick of this guessing game. I can relate to Mr. Johnson's total indifference to the system.
One of the hospitals I rotate in has solved this by having you physically scan your nametag (just like unlocking any of the doors) to log in, log out, and whenever else your credentials are needed. It works pretty well, and no passwords to remember once it's set up.
Maybe we should just get rid of the damn passwords and replace them with a system that makes it easier to remember and use without compromising security. At the very least one password + a smartcard system would be way easier. You enter your password once then you just have to swipe your card when you login to another system.
Most working professionals who aren't software developers suffer through this in some way or another. I mean, heck, let me count up all the passwords I need to do my job:
* A password for the account request system
* A password for the internal services system
* My email password
* My password for the local network
* My password for the product management system
* Pass for the old product management system that we still use
* Pass to the online drawing and document retrieval system
* Password to control room computer systems
* Various maintenance laptop user names and passwords
* Various passwords to systems I'd rather not mention, call them about 10 in total
That's 25 to 30 passwords, total, that I need to remember and use on a regular basis. I've given up NOT writing them down. And IT won't give me any kind of secure password manager, so I resort to a password protected Excel spreadsheet. And I'm not alone.
My old comment still reliant.
Another story about my journey with my son while he battled cancer.
Closed Proprietary image formats and systems HURTS patients. We used the local hospital for Chemo and everything else at the Children's Hospital 1.5 hours away for his legs and lungs. I would always have to wait 20-30 minutes to get a DVD of the studies (PET, CT Scan or MRI even ultrasound, but those are worthless) and then bring them to the doctor. The doctor would be forced to use whatever the portable image viewing program that came on the DVD and then they had to be sent to the IT Department to be imported into their system.
We would be there to remove some horrible tumor but before half his surgeries (I can't count how many surgeries he had) we would have to go in the day before (3 hour round trip) to get the expensive scan done again. One time I had a scan at 11 PM - Midnight and then drive home around 2 AM and be back at the hospital at 7 AM check in for a 10 hour surgery. ALL BECAUSE THE FORMATS ARE CLOSED and SYSTEMS could not connect so that my son's records were all the same every where. I carried 20 DVDs with me all the time just in case.
In case you are wondering my son unfortunately passed away after almost 5 years of fighting. If you are ever interested in giving to a cancer society please consider stbaldricks.org. Most charities give 0% or 2% to pediatric research and that is why we went over 20 years without a new chemo for children till last year, which St Baldrick's funded the research for this amazing new drug to fight a different type of cancer my son did not have.
Nothing surprising here. Far and beyond IT, surgeons posses a rare and special type of ignorance... typical of your average over-powered decision maker with not enough time to understand or other incentives to make good IT decisions. This is really, really common in health IT, and not rare at all, but here's it's presented in the form of an over-entitled surgeon. Some people seem to think that brain surgeon is supposed to add gravitas to any conversation, in terms of understanding or something... but your average QA person is 1000x more likely to make a better decision than a surgeon, when it comes to IT.
And the source of the problems in this article? The legal dept. So please don't blame this one on anyone in IT.
My take away is close to the opposite, having worked around healthcare IT for many years. Systems are antiquated, un-integrated, use archaic and proprietary languages and databases, and the lack of cohesive design for usability encourages most clinicians to keep using paper.
IT as currently and usually practised, especially in a healthcare environment, is also mostly a disaster in terms of value for expenditure. $2 billion for an Epic system in a regional hospital system... Which was obsolete before it was installed. Heck, the Deustche Bank SAP core banking replacement only cost $1 billion.
Much of the "oh but it's regulated" excuses are just that, excuses to be ignorant and stay stuck in the 1970s.
It doesn't have to be this way, but it requires a lucky administration to find a way out of the mess given the market for lemons in IT management and systems integrators in healthcare.
Open source and Cloud solutions (from an operating model perspective way more than technology) appear to be the only way out of this mess of "your mess for less" IT because it lifts the veil of sales, consultant-speak, and opaque RFP processes in favor of actually-working-and-reliable software that anyone can see and touch.
I had a similar reaction to the piece, which painted doctors as not being part of the problem - when they have a profound amount of political power.
I had a friend who worked as a QA engineer (hospital processes) for a presitigious children's hospital. The QA department came up with any number of potential, well-conceived plans, but the falling-down point was always the doctors. One of the primary pain points was the lack of interoperability between different departments' record-keeping. Each department head had their favourite vendor, who would give them all sorts of goodies on the side, and as such, none of them wanted to change.
So, you'd have a heads of department meeting where the new QA plan would be discussed, which necessitated regularising the software across departments. The standard refutation was "If I can't use software X, children will die". Everyone knew this was utter bullshit, but there's nothing you can do when the head of department is considered the final domain expert. "Children will die", uttered by doctors and surgeons, killed more efficient processes in that hospital.
Another story of his was at another meeting where one specialist ventured an opinion. It was derided by one of the old-school, a veteran of nearly 30 years: "We don't do things that way; you'd know that if you'd been here any length of time". Said the opinion-venturer: "I've been here 17 years". That is one insular society...
I worked on a healthcare IT system at one point as a consultant. I tried to the best of my ability to improve upon the UI or the software, at least for the small tasks commissioned to me. I think that most of the other programmers tried to do the same.
It was extremely difficult because the software was written over a long period of time by multiple generations of programming teams and programming styles. It was hodge-podge to say the least. Take that system and integrate it with another equally hodge-podge system. Then add a couple more hodge-podge systems to that. There were just lots of redundancies and disconnects. I did feel sorry for the people who were going to have to use that system.
I'd say that medical administrative software is ripe for "disruption" just because it sucks so badly. Except for the fact that the systems are a) huge b) require extensive domain knowledge c) are regulated d) sales of such systems are extremely political and e) there's no way to do an end-run around the administrators who are purchasing these systems. It doesn't seem very suited for a "move quickly and break things" scrappy startup.
> ‘I’m not starting a big meningioma at 4 p.m.,’ she declared, turning towards me. ‘I’ve got no childcare this evening.’
Without knowing what a "big meningioma" involves, I can only imagine it's something like doing a tricky, manual deployment on Friday afternoon. In that case no, this is a completely reasonable response. People have lives outside of work. Yes, "In the pre-modern NHS consultants never counted their hours – you just went on working until the work was done.", but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. In pre-modern factory days people of any age worked there whole day, 6-7 days a week. It doesn't mean that's a good idea to do it now.
> this is a completely reasonable response. People have lives outside of work.
For someone in IT, perhaps, but the professional expectations in medicine are starkly different (although they are admittedly growing more lax, to the chagrin of the old guard). In this particular case, the geriatric meningioma patient had already been cancelled on once, rescheduled with the promise of being the first procedure of the day, and then delayed to the end of the day because she tested positive for MRSA and they needed to do a decon of the OR after her procedure. You would seem to find it reasonable to reschedule her yet again, but neurosurgeons don't have much room in their schedules to play scheduling games with, and in general, patients aren't undergoing elective brain surgery for the fun of it: they need it now.
Perhaps the IT analogy is that neurosurgery is largely a hard real-time system: you must execute within a given time window or you fail.
When you got the meningioma, you better hope that your surgeon will work until the work is done, instead of delaying it because somebody's unable to find a babysitter.
Medicine was always about putting the patients' needs above your own, and I sure hope it stays that way for the foreseeable future.
> Besides, surgeons can no longer get away with such behaviour. I envy the way in which the generation who trained me could relieve the intense stress of their work by losing their temper, at times quite outrageously, without fear of being had up for bullying and harassment.
This is a good thing. Good lord, the ego of some professionals never fails to astound. Treating people like people in the workplace and not harassing them shouldn't be a difficult concept to come to terms with.
They are a large growth in your brain or spinal cord. With this one, think softball sized. Though the link states that they may not be harmful if left to themselves, for a few days, I'd want it out asap. They can cause brain damage or paralysis in the spine. I know this as my PI had one and could only speak Spanish for a few days as his meningoma was pushing hard on his Broca's Area, the part responsible for a lot of speech.
That the lady was complaining of childcare is unacceptable and she should be reprimanded for it. Health care as a profession comes with costs that you know about when you sign up for the job. One of those is irregular hours. I can't imagine how she thought it was ok to put a person and their family through more costly time in a hospital over having her kid stay at daycare a little longer.
>> ‘I’m not starting a big meningioma at 4 p.m.,’ she declared, turning towards me. ‘I’ve got no childcare this evening.’
so with the scale of the money involved, the system can't deal with several hours of unscheduled in advance childcare? No intern around to send take care of it?
As a programmer in my first year of med school, I can only confirm the frustrations with medical software. As someone that gives a damn about usability/UI/UX, most (all?) EHR systems make me want to bang my head against a keyboard.
I honestly don't know how long I will be able to practice medicine before deciding that I can build something better (as foolhardy a notion as that is).
> before deciding that I can build something better
It's very likely that something better already exists. The reason you use something terrible is because "better" does not result in adoption. Personal relationships, salespeople, and marketers drive adoption, not the quality of the actual product.
If my doctors are anything to go by, you shouldn't worry too much. You'll be able to make your supporting nurses deal with the computer systems for you ...
Not that I'm advocating this as a good thing. I only report a pattern that I've seen across a number of offices. I can also report that the nurses hate the computer system as much as the doctors, probably more.
It's not that bad. You can get api access to a lot of things and automate your work to a large degree, particularly in radiology. Just not a lot of doctors know what to ask for and what is possible.
I love how "mediocre software developers" are called out in the header, but then it goes on to list about 10 different people in different roles that are causing actual problems, all systematic, where a developer would make no difference whatsoever.
I find it somewhat distasteful that a doctor would compare an obese patient to a whale while implying it's less worthwhile to treat them than other patients. It's not the job of medical professionals to pass moral judgment.
Very frustrating, I agree. I have another medical computer system horror story - Did you know that the UK National Health Service spent 12 Billion pounds (18 Billion USD) on a computer system and ended up with....nothing to show for it!!!
"... I envy the way in which the generation who trained me could relieve the intense stress of their work by losing their temper, at times quite outrageously, without fear of being had up for bullying and harassment. ..."
Was at a party with a group of friends who are physicians, surgeons, and medical researchers. It struck me: we software types are so fucking arrogant. I was definitely not the smartest person in the room, and yet I could see IT and CS types mocking these people for their relative computer illiteracy. You know, the people who are actually saving lives every day instead of figuring out how to distract (er, engage) and bilk (er, monetize) people.
There are a lot of people who mock others simply because they don't know a domain of knowledge. You can bet that doctors also mock those who don't successfully take care of their health, especially fat diabetics. Anecdotally, I think fat diabetics are the favorite humiliation punching bag for doctors.
Anyways, the issue that stuck out most saliently to me was the cultural expectation placed upon medical staff to work through any issue regardless of personal life, and what must be a tacit management understanding of the situation. Somebody in management screwed up, and now the doctor is left holding the bag, and this doctor unfortunately feels some responsibility to manage the situation. This doctor is frustrated that the anesthesiologist did not make the same sacrifice, and wanted to tend to family.
I don't blame either of them. Kudos to the doctor for holding the bag that management dropped, and congrats for the anesthesiologist who won't submit to exploitive cultural expectations.
All systems within a medical establishment should be forced to work with a single-sign-on system. That might sound like a lot of effort for a small improvement, but I believe it would be the single highest value change that could be made.
When I read the title I was thinking something different.
Torture is a real and a nightmarish thing, and in this ever shrinking world of ours, we (i.e., Westerners) can no longer think of such horrors as existing only for other people in faraway lands.
Am I the only one who's a bit uncomfortable tossing around the term to apply to a well paid professional who's facing bureaucratic inefficiencies at work?
If someone is literally dying in your duty of care because noone can access any patient records, that sounds tortuous to me. A bit like the Stanford prison experiment, but replace the guards with IT contractors, and the prisoners with surgeons, doctors, and nurses.
"I sat through a 3 hour meeting today and it was pure torture."
"I skipped breakfast today. I'm starving."
If you are truly uncomfortable with these sentences then it's possible that you are either a bit overly sensitive, or else you have trouble differentiating between literal statements and common english expressions.
When we describe mundane things as extreme "I'm _starving_ the slow service at this restaurant is torture" or extreme things as mundane "enhanced interrogation techniques" we lose a little bit of our ability to correctly communicate and even experience the world.
Being in awe should be a rare and wonderful state, but instead it's apt to describe a free sandwich as awesome.
The problem: lazy people with poor vocabulary (and education) and bad journalism and editorial work.
After reading the title, I too expected to find a peculiar story about a covert team made up of software developers and hospital bureaucrats kidnapping and torturing a brain surgeon (which would have been a fascinating article). Instead the "torture" here appears to be a complaint about password policies and paperwork...the word "torture" does seem to be overkill in this context.
[+] [-] vonklaus|10 years ago|reply
> ‘Why forty-five?’
> ‘It’s the forty-fifth month since we signed onto that hospital’s system and one has to change the password every month,’ Caroline replied.
Every month is a little aggressive of a timeline. Also, stop making users do your bizarre regex passwords.
* include caps
* include numbers
* include symbol
* eight charachters
* must be recursive backronym
Also, stop trying to keep password requirements secret. I am sick of this guessing game. I can relate to Mr. Johnson's total indifference to the system.
[+] [-] ArcticCelt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregmac|10 years ago|reply
But yes, IT admins, go on thinking if you just finely craft and tune your password policy enough you'll make users come up with secure passwords.
[+] [-] grittathh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serge2k|10 years ago|reply
Maybe we should just get rid of the damn passwords and replace them with a system that makes it easier to remember and use without compromising security. At the very least one password + a smartcard system would be way easier. You enter your password once then you just have to swipe your card when you login to another system.
[+] [-] defibrelaxing|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dllthomas|10 years ago|reply
I would be fascinated to know how you determine that with a regex.
Unless it's a manually maintained list of known recursive backronyms...
[+] [-] engi_nerd|10 years ago|reply
* A password for the account request system
* A password for the internal services system
* My email password
* My password for the local network
* My password for the product management system
* Pass for the old product management system that we still use
* Pass to the online drawing and document retrieval system
* Password to control room computer systems
* Various maintenance laptop user names and passwords
* Various passwords to systems I'd rather not mention, call them about 10 in total
That's 25 to 30 passwords, total, that I need to remember and use on a regular basis. I've given up NOT writing them down. And IT won't give me any kind of secure password manager, so I resort to a password protected Excel spreadsheet. And I'm not alone.
[+] [-] daveguy|10 years ago|reply
Or at the very least you should sign up for a password storage system like https://passpack.com
[+] [-] baldfat|10 years ago|reply
Not they sent the scan over the internet but they had to copy the scan on a CD and rush it over to the hospital.
SORRY BELLOW is a comment I did this week and it seems just as appropriate.
Here is the discussion on Open Source Software for Developing World Hospitals https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675275
My old comment still reliant. Another story about my journey with my son while he battled cancer. Closed Proprietary image formats and systems HURTS patients. We used the local hospital for Chemo and everything else at the Children's Hospital 1.5 hours away for his legs and lungs. I would always have to wait 20-30 minutes to get a DVD of the studies (PET, CT Scan or MRI even ultrasound, but those are worthless) and then bring them to the doctor. The doctor would be forced to use whatever the portable image viewing program that came on the DVD and then they had to be sent to the IT Department to be imported into their system. We would be there to remove some horrible tumor but before half his surgeries (I can't count how many surgeries he had) we would have to go in the day before (3 hour round trip) to get the expensive scan done again. One time I had a scan at 11 PM - Midnight and then drive home around 2 AM and be back at the hospital at 7 AM check in for a 10 hour surgery. ALL BECAUSE THE FORMATS ARE CLOSED and SYSTEMS could not connect so that my son's records were all the same every where. I carried 20 DVDs with me all the time just in case. In case you are wondering my son unfortunately passed away after almost 5 years of fighting. If you are ever interested in giving to a cancer society please consider stbaldricks.org. Most charities give 0% or 2% to pediatric research and that is why we went over 20 years without a new chemo for children till last year, which St Baldrick's funded the research for this amazing new drug to fight a different type of cancer my son did not have.
[+] [-] officialchicken|10 years ago|reply
And the source of the problems in this article? The legal dept. So please don't blame this one on anyone in IT.
[+] [-] parasubvert|10 years ago|reply
IT as currently and usually practised, especially in a healthcare environment, is also mostly a disaster in terms of value for expenditure. $2 billion for an Epic system in a regional hospital system... Which was obsolete before it was installed. Heck, the Deustche Bank SAP core banking replacement only cost $1 billion.
Much of the "oh but it's regulated" excuses are just that, excuses to be ignorant and stay stuck in the 1970s.
It doesn't have to be this way, but it requires a lucky administration to find a way out of the mess given the market for lemons in IT management and systems integrators in healthcare.
Open source and Cloud solutions (from an operating model perspective way more than technology) appear to be the only way out of this mess of "your mess for less" IT because it lifts the veil of sales, consultant-speak, and opaque RFP processes in favor of actually-working-and-reliable software that anyone can see and touch.
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
I had a friend who worked as a QA engineer (hospital processes) for a presitigious children's hospital. The QA department came up with any number of potential, well-conceived plans, but the falling-down point was always the doctors. One of the primary pain points was the lack of interoperability between different departments' record-keeping. Each department head had their favourite vendor, who would give them all sorts of goodies on the side, and as such, none of them wanted to change.
So, you'd have a heads of department meeting where the new QA plan would be discussed, which necessitated regularising the software across departments. The standard refutation was "If I can't use software X, children will die". Everyone knew this was utter bullshit, but there's nothing you can do when the head of department is considered the final domain expert. "Children will die", uttered by doctors and surgeons, killed more efficient processes in that hospital.
Another story of his was at another meeting where one specialist ventured an opinion. It was derided by one of the old-school, a veteran of nearly 30 years: "We don't do things that way; you'd know that if you'd been here any length of time". Said the opinion-venturer: "I've been here 17 years". That is one insular society...
[+] [-] jakejake|10 years ago|reply
It was extremely difficult because the software was written over a long period of time by multiple generations of programming teams and programming styles. It was hodge-podge to say the least. Take that system and integrate it with another equally hodge-podge system. Then add a couple more hodge-podge systems to that. There were just lots of redundancies and disconnects. I did feel sorry for the people who were going to have to use that system.
I'd say that medical administrative software is ripe for "disruption" just because it sucks so badly. Except for the fact that the systems are a) huge b) require extensive domain knowledge c) are regulated d) sales of such systems are extremely political and e) there's no way to do an end-run around the administrators who are purchasing these systems. It doesn't seem very suited for a "move quickly and break things" scrappy startup.
[+] [-] viraptor|10 years ago|reply
Without knowing what a "big meningioma" involves, I can only imagine it's something like doing a tricky, manual deployment on Friday afternoon. In that case no, this is a completely reasonable response. People have lives outside of work. Yes, "In the pre-modern NHS consultants never counted their hours – you just went on working until the work was done.", but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. In pre-modern factory days people of any age worked there whole day, 6-7 days a week. It doesn't mean that's a good idea to do it now.
[+] [-] OopsCriticality|10 years ago|reply
For someone in IT, perhaps, but the professional expectations in medicine are starkly different (although they are admittedly growing more lax, to the chagrin of the old guard). In this particular case, the geriatric meningioma patient had already been cancelled on once, rescheduled with the promise of being the first procedure of the day, and then delayed to the end of the day because she tested positive for MRSA and they needed to do a decon of the OR after her procedure. You would seem to find it reasonable to reschedule her yet again, but neurosurgeons don't have much room in their schedules to play scheduling games with, and in general, patients aren't undergoing elective brain surgery for the fun of it: they need it now.
Perhaps the IT analogy is that neurosurgery is largely a hard real-time system: you must execute within a given time window or you fail.
[+] [-] paviva|10 years ago|reply
Medicine was always about putting the patients' needs above your own, and I sure hope it stays that way for the foreseeable future.
[+] [-] cdcarter|10 years ago|reply
This is a good thing. Good lord, the ego of some professionals never fails to astound. Treating people like people in the workplace and not harassing them shouldn't be a difficult concept to come to terms with.
[+] [-] sjg007|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|10 years ago|reply
They are a large growth in your brain or spinal cord. With this one, think softball sized. Though the link states that they may not be harmful if left to themselves, for a few days, I'd want it out asap. They can cause brain damage or paralysis in the spine. I know this as my PI had one and could only speak Spanish for a few days as his meningoma was pushing hard on his Broca's Area, the part responsible for a lot of speech.
That the lady was complaining of childcare is unacceptable and she should be reprimanded for it. Health care as a profession comes with costs that you know about when you sign up for the job. One of those is irregular hours. I can't imagine how she thought it was ok to put a person and their family through more costly time in a hospital over having her kid stay at daycare a little longer.
[+] [-] trhway|10 years ago|reply
so with the scale of the money involved, the system can't deal with several hours of unscheduled in advance childcare? No intern around to send take care of it?
[+] [-] kendallpark|10 years ago|reply
I honestly don't know how long I will be able to practice medicine before deciding that I can build something better (as foolhardy a notion as that is).
[+] [-] smt88|10 years ago|reply
It's very likely that something better already exists. The reason you use something terrible is because "better" does not result in adoption. Personal relationships, salespeople, and marketers drive adoption, not the quality of the actual product.
[+] [-] jaskerr|10 years ago|reply
Not that I'm advocating this as a good thing. I only report a pattern that I've seen across a number of offices. I can also report that the nurses hate the computer system as much as the doctors, probably more.
[+] [-] naveen99|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustingetz|10 years ago|reply
(You would end up with the same thing)
[+] [-] bobbles|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagacrap|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] such_a_casual|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanDav|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sampo|10 years ago|reply
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-s...
[+] [-] taberiand|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bootload|10 years ago|reply
Toxic work environments in surgery are on notice in Australia: "Doctors must stand up to the ‘cowardice’ that is ignoring bullying" Victoria Atkinson, SMH ~ http://www.smh.com.au/comment/doctors-must-stand-up-to-the-c...
[+] [-] JabavuAdams|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|10 years ago|reply
Anyways, the issue that stuck out most saliently to me was the cultural expectation placed upon medical staff to work through any issue regardless of personal life, and what must be a tacit management understanding of the situation. Somebody in management screwed up, and now the doctor is left holding the bag, and this doctor unfortunately feels some responsibility to manage the situation. This doctor is frustrated that the anesthesiologist did not make the same sacrifice, and wanted to tend to family.
I don't blame either of them. Kudos to the doctor for holding the bag that management dropped, and congrats for the anesthesiologist who won't submit to exploitive cultural expectations.
[+] [-] aianus|10 years ago|reply
Doctors aren't smart, they're just friendly keeners with something to prove to their helicopter parents.
Edit:
> You know, the people who are actually saving lives every day instead of figuring out how to distract (er, engage) and bilk (er, monetize) people.
Very few doctors do anything of the sort. Most of them just charge you $100+ to tell you what you already knew and write you a scrip or a referral.
[+] [-] wingerlang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickysielicki|10 years ago|reply
They hold the records of over 50% of the US. It's pretty scary when you think about it.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sopooneo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbwest|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yeison|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marshray|10 years ago|reply
Torture is a real and a nightmarish thing, and in this ever shrinking world of ours, we (i.e., Westerners) can no longer think of such horrors as existing only for other people in faraway lands.
Am I the only one who's a bit uncomfortable tossing around the term to apply to a well paid professional who's facing bureaucratic inefficiencies at work?
Or am I just being a sensitive ninny-nanny?
[+] [-] grrowl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakejake|10 years ago|reply
"I skipped breakfast today. I'm starving."
If you are truly uncomfortable with these sentences then it's possible that you are either a bit overly sensitive, or else you have trouble differentiating between literal statements and common english expressions.
[+] [-] colechristensen|10 years ago|reply
>Or am I just being a sensitive ninny-nanny?
At least a little.
When we describe mundane things as extreme "I'm _starving_ the slow service at this restaurant is torture" or extreme things as mundane "enhanced interrogation techniques" we lose a little bit of our ability to correctly communicate and even experience the world.
Being in awe should be a rare and wonderful state, but instead it's apt to describe a free sandwich as awesome.
The problem: lazy people with poor vocabulary (and education) and bad journalism and editorial work.
[+] [-] downandout|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JabavuAdams|10 years ago|reply
Yes. Especially if you have to ask. Either make the case and stand behind it, or don't mention it.
[+] [-] serge2k|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]