If you haven’t read about it before, the term comes from the band Van Halen, who demanded that there were no brown M&M’s backstage. People thought it was just a crazy rock star thing, but David Lee Roth later explained that it had a purpose:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
… So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, “Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
My Brown M&M atm is AI-generated comments like this (first comment is referencing something like df = ... that they removed from the code, but left the comment, second comment is super useless):
# Assuming df is your DataFrame
# Show the plot
plt.show()
That probably means whoever I got the code from just copy/pasted whatever the LLM spit out, and didn’t actually think about the code at all.
What is a small detail that you pay attention to because it means there’s bigger issues to watch out for?
When it’s time for my car to get an oil change I make sure my windshield fluid is empty. It’s a full service oil change and they claim they check ALL fluids. If it’s still empty I question how good or a job they’ve done and what else they skip
My friend bought an old BMW and was taking it to the dealer for maintenance.
Every oil change there was some overpriced small thing wrong that he had to pay for and then adding insult injury at the end they would charge him serious amounts of money for fluid top off. The amount they charged him for windshield washer fluid was enough to buy about five containers of windshield washer fluid. So tired of these antics he went out and he filled the windshield washer fluid 100% to the top there was no air in the jug whatsoever. He took it in for an oil change, they charged him for a windshield washer top off. He demanded the service manager and said that he had topped it off to the very top and there’s no way they added even a teaspoon of windshield washer fluid to it. The service manager refused to take the windshield washer fill off the bill and said they’d give him a credit for the next time he needed windshield washer fluid.
He never went back.
I used to work in serious sim. Think using game engines for realistic combat stimulation and training by the army. Systems had to interact and had different jobs rts, fps, driving simulator, etc.
So they each needed a unit database that was unique to that system. They also usually had a two versions a classified database and a less accurate non classified database.
A quick way to test was there was a unit type that was always set to invulnerable in unclassified databases. So drop one in the sim and drop some artillery on it. If it wasn’t destroyed you were unclassified.
I leave a statement in each version of my resume, and see if a recruiter mentions it. It’s like “ask me about the western 5-legged salamander and how it’s linked to the Olympics” (hint: 5 rings) or something equally absurd but a little more relevant.
If they say the line, then I know they read it. If I ask, “so, did you catch the Olympics?”, and they still don’t pick up on it, they’re judged.
Turtle.
My 11th grade English teacher would hand back essay assignments with grades at the top and no markings throughout. I tended to get high but not perfect grades, but the impetuousness of youth got the better of me. In my next essay, which I wrote normally, I wrote the word “turtle” in the middle of a sentence somewhere in the middle of each main body paragraph. Just somewhere in the middle of a sentence I turtle copy pasted the word “turtle.”
That paper made a 94. There was no mention of it. I’m pretty sure she just graded on who she liked and I wasn’t a problem.
I see what you did there
One time my teacher in high school wrote somewhere in a HUGE word problem that we’d get credit if we filled in letter E (which was on the scantron machine but not a valid option for that question). They were just seeing who actually read the question from start to finish.
Reminds me of a time in elementary school when our class had a lesson on the importance of reading all instructions before starting a project, then we had a test with long, elaborate instructions. Of course, the very last sentence was something along the lines of disregarding all previous instructions and setting your pencil down. I think maybe one other kid besides me got it and was sitting there while the rest of the class was furiously working away, some of them wondering how we were already finished.
In Windows XP/Vista times I used to be the “computer kid”, helping others in the neighbourhood with their computers, in exchange of some pocket money. My brown M&M was a huge amount of desktop icons - nine times out of ten it meant that the issue with the computer (typically “why is it so slow???”) could be easily solved by:
- uninstalling crapware
- updating and running the anti-virus
- updating the system itself
- running disk cleanup
- defragmenting the hard disk
And boom, as if by magic, the computer was over 9000 times faster!
The desktop icons themselves aren’t a big deal, but they show that the person is rather sloppy on maintenance of their own machine. And they probably can’t even move files here and there.
When I first heard about the brown M&M thing, I thought it was just celebrities being petty, or maybe a joke. Years later, when I heard Roth’s explanation, I thought it was absolute genius.
I say howdy to gauge people’s initial reaction when I first meet them. Their reaction to the corny and outdated term is telling about their mental picture of the world. It is the only time I use the word.
Wow, as someone who says howdy to people all the time, I’m surprised you get any kind of reaction at all other than “hi” back.
What do you feel like it tells you about them?
Emotional disposition, logic skills, open mindedness, how a person makes assumptions and inference, maturity, stereotypes, etc. It is a baseline of little value, but it is often a tell that indicates whether a person is worth the time to talk to further. I’m introverted and prefer not to talk verbally. I’m nothing like the typical Southern good ole boy in beliefs, politics, religion, science, or interests. I only like to talk to people that are abstracted in functional thought, that question everything without taking offense, or confuse words for intent or actions; people with depth. A person’s ability to think beyond the first few seconds of an encounter and revise initial assumptions speaks volumes about what is going on in their head. Here in Southern California, if a person accepts the oddity without notice, or they take a passive aggressive or polarized stance, they tip their hand as someone uninteresting and not worth spending any more of my time.
You may have more in common with people from the south than you realize. I live in WNC where plenty of people use that word regularly. Folks in the mountains have widely varying knowledge bases and depth that they often don’t reveal right away. It might seem out of place in Southern California, but you may be shutting yourself off to the possibility that someone could surprise you and offer insight from a perspective you hadn’t considered.
Interesting litmus. Thanks for explaining. I hope it continues to serve you well.
A hoy hoy
I say howdy at least a few times a day. 🤷🏻♂️
Howdy fellow Texan!
Nope. I just said it ironically enough times that it’s now an undeniable part of my vocabulary.
I use this VH trick at work occasionally for fun just to see if anyone reads my service report. “Your boilers are about to fail in the middle of winter but don’t worry I sprinkled pixie dust on them and did a rain dance”. Never heard from anyone not even my boss. One customer I used to write “Does anyone ever read these? If so call me at (phone number)”. I handed it to the man in charge, he pretended to read it, signed it and handed it back to me. The only one my boss called about was the one I wrote that simply said “I took a shit in the floor drain here”
I go to peoples’ homes as a part of my job, and it’s often remarked that how messy someone’s home is seems to correspond to how their life and state of being fares overall.
This does not bode well for me… Does it count if I clean up when I know you’re coming?
I’m not telling as if word gets out people will do that. Just like lazy people now remove brown m&ms without doing the rest of the work.
No idea what field you’re in, but of course you have to adjust it regularly. This year it’s brown m&Ms. Next year it’s a bowl of only yellow ones. The year after, it’s Skittles (no red ones). Kit Kats already split into individual bars. A bowl of Skittles mixed with corn flakes. Brown m&MS as decoy for people skimming for the clause, then later another one about 3 musketeers at the bar. I could come up with enough for an entire career without even leaving the candy realm.
It’s meant to be a very simple, but specific task that is easily performed by anyone that actually read and followed the instructions. It could be a bottle of Dr Pepper (as someone else mentioned), or wearing a yellow shirt upon arrival, or calling the lead “Chief”
I work in the event industry as a production manager, I get to write these things.
As is typical when you have a large crew there will be dietary restrictions, some of them can be deadly. So before me or any of my crew starts unloading the truck I need to have a cold Dr. Pepper in my hand. If I don’t, we doordash, we do not eat the food provided.
I guess it’s not so much a test I perform but a signal I listen for. However my attitude toward lying is probably a bit different from most people. It’s a major red flag for me, and usually, people are completely unaware they’re waving it. Even if it’s something relatively inconsequential, when I see someone effortlessly lying to another person, I assume they’d do the same to me. The fact that they’re so oblivious to it, not even trying to hide it, just strengthens the signal that lying is normal for them. This applies to many, if not most white lies as well.
With the advent of LLMs and access to anyone, there’s been repeated posts about instructors putting some oddball directions in white within the text of a question. Not perfect as a copy/paste into Notepad will show it, but it gets the laziest ones, especially the ones that don’t even review what the LLM gave them.
Everytime with a project when you ask a document that says what has been agreed with the customer and the estimate for a planning and they look at you like a deer in the headlights to then forward a document from the sales guy that just says “we’ll do everything” and a phone book sized map with “a few additional demands from the customer.” Yeah, that project is auditioning for a role as the Hindenburg.
