Fighting the Purple Monkey Dishwasher

There wasn’t a video clip (thanks, Fox), so you just get an image macro instead.

Following the 13-day Halloween countdown, I got slammed with a nice bit of work. In addition to finishing up my stuff for the latest Nintendo Force magazine, reviewing Yo-Kai Watch for Nintendo 3DS (and working on another as well), and all the usual stuff, I’ve also been taking on work for USgamer by transcribing interviews. I admittedly wasn’t sure about it at first, but I’ve grown to like it, and am certainly quite thankful for it.

It’s also fascinating when you sit back and look at what you’re doing.

The process seems simple: listen to a bit of dialogue, and write that dialogue down. However, there is more to it than that.

I’ll listen to what is said, and my mind tries to course correct. I believe it’s the same, or a similar phenomenon as to what can be referred to succinctly as “Purple Monkey Dishwasher,” i.e. that exercise wherein one person starts with a message, tells it to the next person, and so on down the line until the last person ends up with something completely different from what was originally said.

For me, my mind seems to do this almost automatically, and so I have to double check to make sure I transcribed correctly. For shorter bits, such as (for example) “I want to explain just what I’m doing,” my mind might rearrange it to “I just want to explain what I’m doing,” though there’s usually a little more to it than that. If I try to take in something longer, more changes occur and I have to be extra careful. Interestingly enough, the meaning is arguably exactly the same in the end, at least 99 percent of the time, but the last thing I want is to worry about an inaccuracy, and one small slip is all it takes to change the entire meaning of a message. Better safe than sorry.

I’m not really going anywhere in particular with this, except maybe to say “don’t believe what was said is what you heard.” Otherwise, it’s just an observation I decided to pass along with my explanation.

I’ll try to have something of more relevant interest tomorrow.

—

David Oxford is a freelance writer of many varied interests. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.

David Oxford

David Oxford, or “LBD ‘Nytetrayn’,” as he is sometimes also known, is a freelance writer of many varied interests who resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.

For a full list of places to find him online, click here.