So, can we talk about order numbers?
9Whoever conceived of this confirmation method is simply brilliant! It lends an air of fun absurdity to the proceedings.
Some are
Insulting: disgusted -adamant-shrimp
Redundant: old-nostalgic-experience
Accurate: creepy-impulsive-trapper
Coy: taunting-budding-lemon
Or truly meh: mainstream-tolerant-ostrich
They’re reminiscent of The Surrealist Compliment Generator
http://www.madsci.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~lynn/jardin/SCG – “Your love is like 1000 caucasian carnivores playing mumblety peg with an eggplant.”
Oh, man, – now I want to share surreal compliments:
“The sisters of St. Cathode ask that you cover yourself with filaments and take pains to make yourself fully incandescent this evening.”
- 12 comments, 16 replies
- Comment
I like to think of it as an oracle. That's the thing about oracles: you know they're supposed to mean something, but you can't ever be sure what. All you can do is guess.
@joelmw - Maybe if we meditate on them, the answer will come.
@joelmw There is no spoon.
@joelmw The answer is out there, Neo .. er.. joelmw, and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.
We first used this as a means to deliver distinct coupon codes to our first 5,000 members of Woot back in 2004 (6 year old blog post now older than woot launch was to itself). We instructed generation of coupon codes that pulled from different colors and animals and we affixed this code to stickers on the back of the certificates we mailed. We envisioned them being shared and enjoyed as they were also tied to the individual member account, but no one knew that so they were largely kept silent.
so this sort of idea has been used here and there since but we're actually quite a bit more amused with it here than we expected. (big disclaimer that it was very confusing for folks buying from Korea)
had a fun exploration with @shawn about an automated posting of google images that show up from your order ID. we tried a couple but it seems like you'd need flexibility to pick from the top 10 or so images returned to be most fun:
It strikes me that the image search method can make the lame ones quite a bit funnier. It never dawned on me that of course this is why there would be a mainstream tolerant ostrich!
@snapster You do know that will be a thing now, right?
@snapster Just to add, my fuku order# was idiotic-parallel-weaver - this was in the top row of google image search:
@snapster - Not knowing about programming, I just guessed you used a program that randomly combined adjective-adjective-noun. I'd really like to be considered for the position of humorous Google image chooser.
Most of my order phrases don't quite gel and most of the images are correspondingly dull, but one of them (the roaster) gives me a screen shot of a security camera's view of a London Tube passenger on the tracks about to be hit by a train. I think that's more in the line of fricaseeing than roasting, but it was still a good try.
It drove me just a little bit insane looking at all of the order words when I helped put it together and I think that really comes through in a lot of them.
I manually entered all of the words in a document after pulling from various word lists and scouring through wikipedia and had to vet them all to remove any weird dupes or outright offensive ones. Luckily you can still get some offensive stuff through fun combinations.
Definitely happy to see all of the positive responses to it, I love our order word system.
@JonT I can't believe you entered all of that manually. I figured there was a database that you guys tapped into. I guess you created it... manually.
After @JonT created his list, me and @dave and @lukeduff had a meeting where we went through and eliminated adjectives and nouns that we thought would be problematic. We were terrified someone would get something like counterfeit-broken-camera. It took hours but @JonT's hard work and curation was the key to pulling this off.
@shawn I've been waiting for something like that to come up. I thought I just wasn't ordering enough, but I guess I can stop now.
@shawn seriously though, great work, all of you! It's always fun to see what ludicrous phrase is going to come up after clicking "buy it"
@JonT great job - most of the enjoyment of this is in the details you added
@snapster Give that man a raise. Heck, give everyone a raise!
Thanks for the kind words @snapster and @shawn. The devs did a lot of hard work that I never could, it was a team effort!
It actually creeped me out when I ordered something for a good priest friend of mine and my confirmation number was: formidable-reverent-collar.
I like the system in theory, but notorious-gray-taco brings up a bestselling book and some truly unfortunate taco images.
rare-guilty-angle
Which I love, because it's for a fuku bag and I didn't think my order had gone through.
Ok, so the common/proper way to do the image search is to leave the hyphens in the string when searching? e.g. coherent-adaptable-basketball not coherent adaptable basketball -- the results aren't the same.
@sligett - There are no rules, it's all up to you.
my most recent one is: quickest-odious-blackberry
number 1 image was
haggard-thoughtless-pear
Kinda confused about this one.
@JonT I'm pretty sure it's the secondhand/default goat's fault. That would be @narfcake.
@OldCatLady Sorry for the confusion, @JonT!
@sligett
my last order# was
incognito-opportune-kitten. i prefer googling without hyphens:because with hyphens:
wat?
I try to use my order confirmation phrase as a challenge to use each word in casual conversation each day. Give it a shot. Sometimes it's harder than you'd think.