Alright, so you get these things thrown at you sometimes, right? Stuff that just makes you stop and think, “What in the actual heck am I looking at?” I’ve had my share, believe me. And one that really sticks out, just for sheer “huh?” factor, was this one time with a project, or what was supposed to be a project. The working title they slapped on it? Well, let’s just say it was memorable: “stomach thing sex.” Yep. You read that right.
So there I was, looking at this line on a brief. My first reaction? Probably what yours is right now. Like, is this a joke? Did someone spill coffee on their keyboard and this is what came out? Or worse, was someone actually serious? You never know, man. I’ve seen some wild stuff.
The “practice” part, if you wanna call it that, was me trying to figure out what on God’s green earth this was supposed to lead to. I didn’t even know where to start. I mean, do you just walk up to your manager and say, “Hey, about this ‘stomach thing sex’ item…”? Sounds like a fast track to an HR meeting, you know?
So, I did what any sane person would do:
- Stared at it for a solid hour.
- Tried to break it down. “Stomach thing.” Okay, maybe something about digestion? Health? A new diet fad?
- Then the “sex” part. Just… why? How? Connected to stomachs? It was a total blank.
I cautiously poked around. Sent some real vague emails. “Could you provide a bit more context on the project tentatively titled with keywords related to ‘gastric matters’ and, uh, ‘demographics’?” Yeah, I was dancing around it like it was a landmine. The replies I got back were just as confusing. Nobody seemed to quite know, or they were too embarrassed to admit what it was really about if it was something dodgy.
This went on for, no joke, like three days. Back and forth, whispers, confused shrugs. I was convinced it was either some super-secret, embarrassing internal code for something mundane, or someone higher up had completely lost their marbles. My money was on the latter, mostly.
And then, the big reveal. After all that headache, all that tiptoeing, what was “stomach thing sex”? Get this. It was supposed to be for a new section on the intranet about “Stomach Health & Exercise.” Someone, somewhere along the line, had either typed it out atrociously, or there was an auto-correct disaster of epic proportions, or maybe English wasn’t their first language and they just… guessed. “Exercise” somehow became “sex.” Don’t ask me how. I stopped asking questions at that point.
So, all that fuss, all that weirdness, for a couple of web pages about eating your greens and doing sit-ups. It’s just wild, man. The kind of stuff that makes you shake your head and wonder how anything gets done. That was my “practice” – wading through the nonsense to get to the incredibly boring truth. Just another day, right?
