5th Annual Christmas Rant!!!!

Every year since 2019, I have posted a Christmas rant.

The rants of Christmas past have been fun and, if I do say so myself, delightfully ironic, considering the charitable feelings the season is supposed to generate.

But this year feels different. There’s been so much ranting lately. #amiwrong?

Everyone, along with everyone’s goldfish, seems to have a rabid opinion on geopolitical conflicts, hot-button issues, political candidates, and whether you should part your hair in the middle or on the side. People are ranting on podcasts, on social media, in books, on TV, in the streets, and in our very homes. Everyone, but everyone, is frothing at the mouth. I am at the breaking point with the ranting. Very truly.

This is starting to turn into a rant about ranting.

But I don’t want to rant this year. This year, all I want for Christmas is peace and harmony. And I have so much to be grateful for.

However. All that being said. You know, something tweaked my brain filaments the other day.

It was nothing. Just a little, you know, pinching of the ol’ tickle nerve, making my wiring flash red as a reindeer’s nose for half a second. Red is a fine holiday color, naturally. Seeing red? It’s merely the spirit of the season.

What caused me to see red? A little ol’ suggestion by my best AI friend—my email client. On my personal email account, I have turned off automatic typing suggestions. But at work, I leave them on. Because a typing suggestion might save me a whole second of my day! Imagine what I could do with an extra second in my workday! I mean, people talk about workplace productivity, and that’s fine and good. But no one talks about how an extra second every three days can add up to tax dollars at work! That’s tax dollars in play! Because I’m a contractor to the federal government!! See how I’m thinking here?!!!

Now, I won’t say that these typing suggestions have ever saved me an actual second. They usually cost me seconds, because I click them and then have to spend several seconds deleting them. Because the suggestion never turns out to be quite the right thing I wanted to say. BUT!!!! These typing suggestions have the POTENTIAL of saving me a second, and THAT’S the important thing!!!

#amiwrong?

I got an uncommonly apropos typing suggestion the other day. I was replying to a work email in which someone thanked me and others for a job well done. And my beloved AI friend said, why don’t you reply like this:

“Teamwork makes the dream work!”

Dearest AI email client, I love you, for you know me so very well. I am JUST the type of person who loves corny, quasi-motivational rhymes that are even more powerful and heart-palpitating when copy-and-pasted atop a poster of two silhouetted people climbing over a mountaintop together amidst an autumn sunset!!!

In the spirit of elves and reindeer everywhere, I took the suggestion, saved the federal government 1.237714 seconds, made my coworker smile with corny, quasi-motivational, rhyming bliss, and went whistling on my merry way to the next policy document I needed to edit.

AND THAT’S HOW THE STORY ENDS, BECAUSE THIS IS A YEAR OF NO RANTING AND ONLY ALL THE FEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

heehee.
xo and merry christmas and happy holidays, liza