starvation, n. A state of extreme hunger

In one of my very favorite independent films, The Pigeon Egg Strategy, there is a damned long conversation about language between the main[1] characters.

One of the topics these characters discuss is that words have meaning and that, without a word to describe that meaning, the meaning is unknown or effectively nonexistent. An example used in the movie is "starvation", where natives were not dying of hunger and malnutrition and, in fact, could not die of starvation until Europeans arrived to give them that word.

We're not saying that starvation didn't exist, we're saying that without a word in the language to define the meaning, it wasn't possible to explain it in that context and, therefore, the context didn't not exist.

The movie itself is full of these things, including an analysis by Sichems of the phrase "we kill to teach" that the killers use to justify why they want the children's book author dead. Of course, they lose her position as soon as she wanders off to have a chat with the guy who's more than happy to steal someone's newspaper and explain all of this.

I tell you this now because I find myself in a real-life situation absolutely paralleled by the story of starvation.

I work for a company that accepts online payment by credit card. You enter your Visa number and click "submit". The order request generates an uncharged order entry on our intranet. A live human being then clicks a "Charge" button and either bills the amount purchased or receives a "declined" status from the credit card company.

You can imagine how often people will place a full-on, didn't-bother-checking-it-first, totally legitimate order for hundreds of dollars more than they thought they were buying because they entered "11" instead of "1" or some such nonsense. These are orders that are clearly divorced from the client's intention, but are valid orders nonetheless. We could, in theory, click "Charge" and then refund the money, but it would be oh-so-much easier to just cancel that order. The functionality to cancel an order did not exist until a few weeks ago when one such order was placed after midnight and proceeded to page two innocent engineers all night long.

The next morning it was tasked to me to create a "Hold" button for uncharged orders on the intranet. It sits next to the "Charge" button and simply changes the order's status from "Uncharged" to "On Hold", which is important because it puts the order in a state where a client is not being charged an incorrect amount of money and engineers are not being constantly paged because there's a pending order that needs to get processed.

For the few years that this intranet order system has been running, there has not been a need for a "Hold" button until the day before I was asked to create one. Since adding that button a couple of weeks ago, it's been used about six times.

Problems, it seems, really don't exist until we have the terminology to deal with them. An order has never, ever had to be put on hold before. Now, it happens on a regular basis and the "Hold" button is an invaluable tool for handling dumb orders and avoiding serious accounting SNAFUs. Where's my chianti and orange juice?

[1] A key directive of the movie is that the least important person in the movie has the most dialogue. This conversation is precisely how they go about fulfilling this objective.