You might have noticed that over the last two years I was getting more and more dissatisfied with my job. Or, more precisely, with my employer.
Twelve years ago I landed a job at a USA corporation owned factory that had all the right components – interesting job where I could learn new things all the time, both manually and intellectually challenging so I could show off my wide skill set, and well paid, extremely so for my humble standards. After a few years however the shine got a bit worn off, as I was constantly struggling with the mindset that was prevalent on key management positions and I was always outspoken about my disagreements with anyone, no matter how higher in the hierarchy they were above me. Despite this (or maybe because of it?), I got enough respect and clout at all levels in the company that when it came to a serious clash between me and a complete nincompoop of a mid-ranking manager, where unkind words were said on record, the manager was sacked and not me.
All this instilled in me a deep loathing of managers and especialy those who have MBA. To me, MBA managers are the embodiment of Dunning-Krueger effect – they have no discernible skills, but they think they can dictate actual experienced experts how they should do their job. Not every manager is like this of course, but enough of them that it is noticeable.
Then the whole company was acquired by another international giant, this time a german one. For a short while it looked like things will get better, that the flaws/positives ratio will shift a bit for the better regarding how workers are treated. It did not last – our division was chipped off of the big block and sold off again. And unfortunately again to a USA owned company.
From the start I was fearing that things will go back to the bad old ways, and they did. More than that, it quickly became apparent that things will get a lot worse before they get better – if they get better. And these suspicions were proven true when previous years – in direct contradiction to what we were told after the acquisition I might add – a massive round of layoffs has started. First people were “merely” encouraged to go and they got adequate or even generous severance packages if they decided to do so. Then started the push to slash personnel even more, and people got terminated. Still with severance packages, because this is EU and not USAistan, but loss of job is still a loss of job, even when you get handed several month’s worth money.
When I started, I was first part of and then the head of a three-person team. The clash with the idiotic manager was because the team was taken from me and I was forced to do all the work alone, which was only possible in an Excel sheet, not in an actual real world. I got one team member reinstated and some duties were given to another team. It was still not ideal, but it was workable and under the then german owner it seemed like it might improve again in the future. However this last round of layoffs took also my last subordinate for good and it meant that I would, again, have to do everything by myself.
I am not willing to risk a full blown burn-out.
So I decided to quit. Had I been a mediocre or worse worker, I would have gotten a decent severance package and I could leave the company straight away. But being good has some drawbacks. The company did not want me to quit, and I was told I won’t get anything if I do so. I had some quite intense (but polite and respectful) exchanges with both my supervisor and my HR manager and an agreement was made, due to be signed on Monday. I cannot of course disclose the details (and if you by some coincidence know or think you know any of the obscured details, do not disclose them in the comments, it would get you banned and the comment deleted), but I can say that I will stay at the company until November and do my best to impart some key components of my extensive experience on my successors. In exchange for that I won’t be completely stiffed. I would prefer to go straightaway, but this is the financially more savvy option.
I could only go into the negotiations as I did because I predicted the situation and I was already preparing for this option for the last year, saving money so I feel more secure and can actually afford to say “I quit anyway” and mean it. I still get less than I would if the company fired me (partially because I still underestimated the strength of my hand, but for that I only have myself to blame), but a lot more than I would if I had one-sidedly quit. I do not recommend to anyone to try what I have done, however, I have also seen people to overplay their hand in these things.
My next plan – and it will affect the blog, hopefully in a good way – is to not seek another job. I feel pretty confident that I would find one, but I am so mentally tired from corporate culture that I need a looong rest to get my bearings back. So the plan is to make knives for a year and see where that goes. I will wake up just as if I were to go to a job, work 8-10 hours daily at knives, and when I build a bit of stock I will try if people will buy them. If it works, great. If it does not, the worst that can happen is that after a year (or perhaps a bit more, depending on how quickly the money dries up) of doing something I like doing I will be forced to sell the knives for just the price of the raw materials and seek employment again.
This is not the first time I am doing this. Straight after university I was working in USA for a short while and with the exchange rate at that time I could subsequently afford to be one year unemployed and live off of the savings. I used that time and money for purchasing a good PC and learning myself the skills needed to build and maintain one, as well as the skill set needed for work with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Photoshop etc. all that new fangled stuff that I did not learn at school but thought – correctly – will be important in the future. This has helped me to land my first job, in which I have spent five years and I left it for similar reasons (and under similar conditions, funnily enough) as the current one. I felt quite happy leaving that job, despite not having a new one yet. And I feel similarly happy now as I did then. I hope it works out well for me again.
Charly this is wonderful news, I am so pleased for you. I hope knowin the date will make it easier to cope with the day to day crap until then. To Charly’s Knives!
I always get a sort of existential dread when I think about the degree to which our lives are random. Well, not random -- but it’s a sort of directed randomness: we swim in a general direction but the waves push us where they will. Sometimes we wind up on a comfortable spot on the shore, other times we struggle just to survive. And so does everybody else -- even the jerks with MBAs think they are working hard and making important contributions. To me the whole thing resembles a completely pointless machine.
I think it’s great that you’re going to try something like working for yourself. From your earlier postings about it, it seems you have the disciplined and thoughtful approach that is so important.
Congratulations!
I am happy for you, Charly. Years ago I realized I simply can not work for other people, so I started working for myself and although yes it’s rough at times, at least I don’t have managers ordering me to do stupid, pointless things. My work makes other people really happy, and it also makes me happy. There is no steady paycheck so that is a drawback but I feel the benefits outweigh that. I hope it goes really well for you.
Here, have a laugh. I wish you all the best and hope you’ll enjoy your time.
Good for you, having the foresight to get out before burn-out. A lot of what you wrote resonated with me (not least the takeover by a US corporation, and their moronic, reptilian management), but I stuck around for a couple years longer than I should have, and after six years I’m still recovering (I hope!).
You talked about this before and I’m glad you can finally take that step. Keeping fingers crossed for the knife making businesses.
Don’t they always lie?
The part of the company Mr worked for got split off some years ago, all with assurances that nobody had any intention to sell it and now guess what’s happening.
Mr smelled the rat and refused to leave the parent company. Back then some colleagues thought he was talking bullshit when he predicted just that and some of them were angry with him for having been right instead of the management for having been lying fuckers.
By the way -- once you’ve tried working for yourself for a few years, it is very very hard to go back to having to take orders from people whose abilities you do not respect (which means most executives). It’s why, when I started doing bits of consulting work in 1989 and 1990, I was incapable of taking orders from “managers.”
I guess I make a mental distinction between “orders” (which are based on authority and position) versus “suggestions” (which are an acknowledged collaborative idea, in which we agree that doing a certain thing is the right approach). At the point where I’m accepting/internalizing an idea to the point where it doesn’t matter where it came from, I am not following “orders” I am following “a strategy.” To me one of the huge failings in American corporate management is that the MBAs have the idea that they can manage by directive, rather than getting everyone on the same page. Note “agreement” is different from “getting everyone on the same page” -- I should probably do a posting about some places I have learned about this, over at stderr. Of course there is no way that is always “right” -- which is part of why adapting a strategy-oriented approach is best.
Charly, I hope you can make it! No employer is worth a burnout.
Where did you let it loose? Have you tried to recapture it?
I realize that editors often write — and misspell — headlines, but this article is rife with spelling and grammatical errors. A proofreader would be very useful. Is English not Charly’s native language?
The year of knife making sounds like a great way to regroup after having such a stressful job. Too bad that you can’t just leave, but at least you know that the end is near. I wish you good luck, and hope that means we will get all sorts of interesting things to read on the blog.
bobmunck
Nyet, and additionally, Charly has many, many languages besides English at their disposal, Bob. I am sure loose was intentional, and the grammar is fine too. They aren’t writing a textbook, so informal usage and idiom are completely appropriate.
@bobmunck, I am doing my best with proofreading and spellcheck, but since English is indeed not my native language and English spelling has no logical structure behind it that one might learn and is pure rote memorization, I am afraid that you just have to live with my writing as it is.
Why do we have so many grammatical experts coming to this blog lately? Calling our blogposts articles and acting like they should be some kind of high literature? I feel like they’re missing the point somehow.
Anyway. re: the OP -- I hope you have a good year of knife-making, I hope the rest and craftwork is good for you. And if you do decide that you want/need to work for someone again, it’s not always as bad as Marcus paints. ;) A friend who’s been self-employed for several years is returning to work for a firm (architecture) and she says it’s a huge relief because she has to worry less about the administrative and tax bits of working. So I think in the end you will find a solution that fits you!
And well done recognizing the end of the road for you, and for getting out before burning out. Best of luck!
I have no idea but they’re fuck annoying. Not only do typos and grammar mistakes happen, they also happen on the blogs of our native speaker colleagues yet I rarely see people schooling them on their mistakes. Yet us non native speakers aren’t seen as making mistakes but making errors.* And we’re not allowed to make puns or jokes. I remember once telling a native speaker that I don’t use no double negations. You can imagine what followed…
*In language teaching/theory of language acquisition, a mistake is when you actually know the difference between then and than but just type the wrong one while an error is not knowing the difference.
I think one thing is that you notice the kind of errors (or mistakes) you don’t make. This is the kind and good-natured explanation. On the other hand, many people make some kinds of trivial errors and mistakes, so pointing them out can lead into an endless quagmire of useless chatter and bickering.
It’s easy to laugh at “Rally Driver’s English” or whatever “bad” but clear and functional English is called in your neck of woods, but it gets the job done. I see no bad English in this blog.
—
I wonder if managers with Industrial Engineering and Management background (who have a technology minor and IEM major) are better with dealing technological and scientific realities.
@Ice Swimmer
In my experience mostly yes, although it is no guarantee and they too can be imbeciles with more self esteem than brains.
But for managers whose sole education consists of “management” the exact opposite is true.
The worst part of modern managerial mindset is to me the idea that literally everything can be boiled down to a simple number, some easily recognizeable metric that stays the same regardless from the industrial process to which it is applied. Like the ratio between head count and revenue etc. And slightest deviation from the table-prescribed values for these metrics has to be corrected.
The company for which I work now for example literally fetishises the Pareto principle to absurd and ridiculous levels. The previous one has somewhat fetishised Six Sigma, but that at least contains multiple evaluation methods in its tool set, this new one only uses one tool and applies it everywhere, indiscriminately.
The ensuing mentality is “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, with corresponding results.
A joke from way back when, when *everybody* got their own personal computers right at their desks:
How can you tell when Mr. Boss has been using the word processor?
chigau @17: Whiteout on the screen?
I had a poster in my office that was a subtle* dig at managers: Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.
*Well, subtle to managers**
**I did come across some good ones, actually. Women and/or ex-programmers. Who hated their jobs.
Rob #18
Yup.
I wish you the best Charly!
Is #13 spam?
@avalus, thank you.
It was spam.
Good for you, Charly. I wish you happiness and success.
@Charly, suggest you look into Grammarly. It does a pretty good job of checking spelling and grammar, and of suggesting corrections. I do find myself disagreeing with it on the use of commas now and again, but commas are pretty harmless.
Sorry if I sounded harsh; my disagreement is more with Freethought Blogs for not providing proofreading for its contributors.
bobmunck
Why should Freethought Blogs provide proofreading? It’s a collection of individual blogs, each is responsible for their own posts in their own little niche, there’s no overarching authority that monitors posts or anything in them. The point isn’t to write with perfect grammar but to communicate one’s ideas. I should think you understand the difference.
You seriously miss the point of the site if you think proofreading should be provided. Perhaps someone should also vet content?
You’re starting to sound more and more like spam.
Please keep your grammar opinions to yourself -- this is a final warning.
Bobmunck
Mate, take a hint. Your grammar policing is neither needed nor appreciated. As rq alteady said, I suggest that you either contribute to the topic or just be quiet.
bobmunck,
Nitpipcking about grammer won’t be tolerated on this site. This is a warning. If you don’t like the way our writers write, I suggest you find another site where you won’t find any mistakes. Our writers are independent and do not require proofreading from an outside source or the Freethought Blog police. I am a native English speaker and I’ve been known to make mistakes on purpose for effect and by accident as well. I am also the only writer on this site who is not bilingual or multilingual and I appreciate the effort required to write in a language that is not your mother tongue. I quite like the sound of thoughts coming from another language. You might want to try and be open that yourself.
@bobmunck, English language is a mess that was created by merging three now dead languages/language dialects together a few hundred years ago, plus a peculiar wovel shift that followed. There are no sensible spelling rules one might learn and the grammar is often quirky too.
I am doing my best, and I will continue to do my best, to get my ideas across and not to mangle English too much in the process. If you do not understand something, fine, I am willing to provide an explanation and re-formulation of any phrase that is giving you grief.
But if you feel that I mangle English to a point that makes my writing unreadable to you, tough buns, you just have to lump it. Or go away.
____________________
And just for lulz, and because I like to do that kind of thing, I pluged this article into the grammarly webpage. It has shown me a rate of 38 “writing issues” per 1.000 words. I also have checked two articles from native English speakers on other blogs on FTB. Their rate was 46 and 32 “writing issues” per 1.000 words.
Together with the fact that no other native English speaker ever has had a significant issue with my writing/speaking on this blog or even at work I conclude:
I am not going to spend even more time than I already do with writing in a foreign language just to satisfy someone’s anal-retentive hangups about spelling perfection and comma placements. And I am for sure not going to spend any actual money on improving my writing, which I do for free.
bobmunck
Don’t be such a fucking pratt.
I just recently submitted (after log procrastination) my first scientific paper. It was supposed to be written “consistently” in either British English or US English, and damn if I can consciously police that distinction in my writing.
I might have invested money and time in professional proofreading. Instead, I just relied on spellcheck, and my own and supervisor’s ESL skills (she doesn’t seem to have problems with this particular language issue).
Half my adult life has been wasted, reading FTB and other interesting (generally American) blogs, If I haven’t at least learned to write passable American English. Now we’ll see what the reviewers say.
Long procrastination, not log.
lumipuna
I’m a big fan of the idea of “European English” or even acknowledging certain peculiarities that occur when people of a different mother tongue (say German or French, to name just two) speak English as their own varieties.
As for mixing stuff up: that’s a completely normal thing to occur during natural language acquisition. Us ESL speakers don’t acquire our English in one certain linguistic environment. We’ll read books and watch film written by English authors as well as Nigerian authors, pick up phrases or idioms that are typical for places we never have been to and none of that is a conscious process.
Native speakers who take Umbridge (see, I made a joke!) with that can go fuck themselves.
Much of what was The British Empire has English as a semi-official language. It is taught in school and the government and business use it. It can vary greatly from country to country.
But it still makes it easier for American tourists to be understood, wherever they go.
Especially if they yell.
European English is totally a thing. If anyone ever does a post on this, I will both vilify and defend it as a legitimate dialect of English (because some of it is funny, some of it is strange, but it is a funny, strange thing that works and has its own funny, strange rules -- like all the other Englishes out there). It is A Thing. This is not an observation only I have made but I have it on good authority from someone most familiar with the couloirs of Brussels who is also a native (Australian) English speaker.
lumipuna
Congratulations!!! I hope it is well-received. :)
Some language slips can be highly amusing, though. Today, I attended a PhD career seminar (in English), where the speaker (a Finnish educator who generally pronounces English better than I do) mentioned “coaching experience” as an example of a marketable skill you might have outside of your scientific subject knowledge. She initially clearly said “couching experience”, before quickly correcting herself.
Congratulations, lumipuna!
I started to wonder if procrastination time has a log-normal distribution.
Congratulations Lumipuna
That’s a major accomplishment! I’ve always thought that writing in a different language than your mother tongue must be very difficult. I speak pigeon French and I can read a bit in French, but I absolutely couldn’t write my way out of a French paper bag. Well done! I’m sure the reviewers will find it well done.
Thanks, all. I’ll celebrate when the paper is actually accepted for publication.
@rq:
To make the site better.
Correct grammar always communicates better than incorrect grammar. Over a long career, I wrote a fair number of technical papers for publication, white papers, proposals, requirements specifications, technical analyses, etc. and served as a reviewer for similar things by others. I am quite convinced that they were generally successful because they were clearly written, and that they were clear because I use correct English grammar. The rules of grammar of a natural language represent our shared understanding of how that language is to be used. Why would you use a construct that did not fit that shared understanding?
It’s likely that content is vetted if only post facto. If someone published a pornographic article or one filled with vile obscenities, I doubt that it would be allowed to remain online.
I’m curious by what authority you are making that threat. I’d note that you had just claimed that the site has no central authority. Several other commenters seem to think that they can make similar threats.
I’d note that I suggested a quite painless approach to pretty good proofreading: the Grammarly plugin. I believe that there are several such aids available.
@Charly
The way I see it, every languague is a “mess” in one way or another. E.g. French -- hard pronunciation, Mandarin -- tones, characters, Spanish -- ser/estar, some verbs, grammatical gender, Arabic -- hard pronunciation, characters, lots of dialects, German -- grammatical gender, etc.
So, out of curiosity, can you give an example of a languague that is “not a mess / smallest mess” (for you).
Charly, I’m happy to hear the news! I wish you all the best, both with coping with the next months until November and afterwards with the knife making. I hope you can make it work!
***
lumipuna, congratulations and good luck! I know what you mean about relying on the spellchecker to make sure the English is consistent. I don’t keep track of it when I’m writing or joining sections written by different co-authors, so it’s an item on the long checklist of things to do before submission (…of a paper. I wouldn’t expect anyone to worry about such things before posting on a blog. Sheesh).
Swedish has a fairly regular spelling (g is the least regular part*) and while it has grammatical gender, it causes less problems than in German because of fewer genders, grammatical cases and simpler congruence rules for adjectives. Of course, like in other Germanic languages, the difficulty comes in know which preposition to use in whatever context you are in.
__
* = I go/walk is jag går (pronounced ya gawr (the r is pronounced)) but I went is jag gick ( pr. ya yick).
@Gelaos, no, I cannot give you any example, you are correct that every language is a mess, just every language in a different way. English has complicated and nonsensical spelling, Czech has complicated and nonsensical gendering etc.
@bobmunck, you are in moderation. I have approved this one last comment of yours, only to have on public record your obtuseness. This is my final response to your persistent pestering with grammar policing.
If you want to go into a pissing contest, then so be it. I speak fluently, albeit imperfectly, four languages. I have a basic understanding of a fifth one. I also have a limited understanding of another three, or perhaps even more, in written form.
Over my career, to this date, I wrote over 1000 test reports alternately in two foreign languages. My grammar never was perfect and I am glad that I had a native speaker to review the texts. But he never had to make major changes and even when I had to skip on proofreading because he was ill or on holiday, there was never a complaint or hindrance to understanding from colleagues or customers. For the whole twelve years that I work in a foreign land, I am communicating on a daily basis with imperfect grammar, constantly misgendering words, messing up word order etc. This was no hindrance whatsoever to me getting respect and eventually giving lectures to even senior colleagues about technical stuff. True, correct grammar is better than a slightly incorrect one, but perfect grammar is not needed for understanding. And in fact, perfect grammar is usually not used even by native speakers in about 90% of their communication -- there are slangs, accents, and dialects galore in every language around the world, English is no exception.
The site has no central authority, but authors of individual blogs are curators of said blogs. Which also includes the power to moderate comments. It does not speak well about you that you do not know this. Even worse, you come into the comments section and you do not notice that you are speaking with the authors of this blog? That gives them the authority to issue warnings. If you want to butt into somewhere in order to be all smug and lecturing, you should at least have the decency to get acquainted with whom you are talking to.
This is a community of friends, not a scientific publication. If you wish to talk, talk about the contents of the articles.
If you try policing grammar again, you will be banned forthwith.
On the authority of Charly being one of the blogging team here on Affinity, and, I can assure you, with the full support of the other three. Jesus on a bicycle, you are annoying.
Oh please. You come here playing grammar police and you obviously don’t have the slightest cue about linguistics. English is descriptive, not prescriptive. There is no such thing as “correct” grammar, there’s only common usage or usage acceptable in certain situations.
Want an example? If I was you I would read that sentence carefully.
Is it correct? When is the third person singular acceptable instead of were? It absolutely wasn’t when I started to learn English.
What’s the matter with ain’t?
Or I has.
If I say “I don’t like no ice cream”, am I obscuring the meaning or am I intensifying it?
Communication always happens in a social interaction, all meanings are socially constructed.
I noted that thou dost not use the correct second person singular. Really, how am I to understand thou whilst using such incorrect grammar?
And I forgot to close my tag.
Charly, wouldst thou be so kind?
bobmunck,
Do you work for Grammarly? Is that what the issue is? Affinity currently has 4 authors in 4 different countries who all speak different languages, but who all write in English. We all write independently and we each have our own unique voice. There is a big difference between writing technical reports and writing to communicate ideas. The former is meant to relay data and information and must be precise while the latter is meant to provoke thought and discussion and requires storytelling and style. People do not sit down to read technical reports and what you call poor grammar I call voice and style. Instead of obsessing about grammar, you should try to be open to hearing the voice of the author. Your nitpicking is stifling. And annoying.
Although we are all independent writers we are also a team. We respect and trust one another and we support each other. I’m not sure what you mean by “several other commenters seem to think they can make similar threats” because you have not provided any corroborating data, but if Charly says Final Warning then Final Warning it is. Your comments are welcome here if they relate to the topic and discussion at hand, but continuing to pick at our imperfect grammar or style, long after you have been asked to stop, is not acceptable.
Gealos
You are right that every language is a mess, because the change and grown naturally*, but I’d say English is a special case because of its history. You start out with different Germanic dialects. Then you mix in Scandinavian languages (there’s interesting work on kenningar, compound nouns that entered the English language through contact with Scandinavian languages). Then you have the Norman conquest and for a long time English basically disappears from official use, at a time when the other European languages made some serious developments especially as written languages while English basically loses its inflections (which does make it easy to learn for the first 3 years or so. Then it gets complicated), but gains a huge vocabulary. And finally many languages cleaned up their spelling at some point, but English didn’t. To a language learner, stuff like “ser/estar” or “der/die/das” may be complicated, but it’s not for native speakers, while English spelling really is for everybody. And as somebody who learned both languages, French pronunciation isn’t more difficult than English pronunciation. It all depends on what sounds there are in your mother tongue and what sounds there are in the language you’re trying to learn.
I love comparative liguistics and etymology, but English is my first language and I have fluency in very formal grammatically correct Spanish with some extra high formal cases that also work for reading vulgar Latin. (speaking in Spanish is very different than writing it) Reading French is really similar to reading Spanish, though the gendering of inanimate objects is very weird to me. I can read some German (mostly via researching my genealogy records) with the help of dictionaries, and had multiple G-parents who spoke (argued) three different flavors of German, so I understand the basic forms/syntax of spoken German, but to read it I spend a lot of time sounding out words and trying to figure out if they are nouns, verbs, or adjectives.
English spelling is a hodgepodge of rules because Latin lacks several letters that are in the runic alphabets, thorn, eth, dt, tz, ing/nj, V/W and there are multiple runic alphabets that were adapted for different dialects. There are several hundred years of history and upheavel separating the earliest writing in Elder futhark, and these versions that were adapted for Anglo-Saxon and Nord dialects. AFAIK, the eldar futhark has a lot of pre-christian beliefs built into it, so as the different tribes became forcibly baptised and literate, they also tended to change the letters that referred to those Gods and Goddesses. Unfortunately, most of the continental germannic pre-christian literature that existed ( it is clear that ancient scribes were copying something, but the original manuscripts are lost) was deemed pagan barbarity and destroyed by Loius the Pious, who inherited it from Charlemagne.
In my experince , the most confusing part of learning to read in proto- germannic dialects of early antiquity is inflecting all the words, especially the inflecting of numbers to show possession, or as adjectives. . There are so many odd three and four letter words, but no punctuation or lower case letters. Nouns are routinely verbed, especially for poetic effect. There is no such thing as standard spelling, and it’s full of terrible/hilarious puns and clever wordplay. These rarely work when translated into English, because of spelling. Ie. “instead of naming her a Knight, they’re namin’ her a Knitten” is an example where the alliterating words still work as a punch-line. .
In addition to the homophone problems between the inflected words for 2-3, ver-vas-var-4, and the pronouns du/die and thee/thy/their ( to, too, two, Tew/ Tyr) I suspect part of the reason American English has lost the gendered forms and most of the inflection forms has to do with social class, and politics. I have read missonary priests decribe the language of the Saxons as “de ne’ chiendo”, which means like dogs. He also noted that both genders wore eye make-up to great effect, and the men spent much effort dressing their hair into elaborate styles.
British English has preserved a few of the high formal grammar conventions for addressing royalty. The queen is never referred to as she. Proper grammar requires the third person formal “Her royal majesty” and royals used the royal We.
Many years ago I was in an MIT study group for the artificial language Loglan. We had a fairly complete BNF (Backus-Naur Form) specification of its grammar and I hacked a Texas Instruments Speak-N-Spell to do a pretty good job of pronouncing it. (Strangely, it spoke in Stephen Hawking’s voice.) Dealing with an artificial language like that really gives you some idea about the syntactic complexity of natural languages. I know a lot of programming languages, and it showed me just how different computer and human languages are, to the point that we should have different words for the two types of things.
Sadly, the group was dissolving into angry politics when I went off to live in Linz for awhile. Apparently, the political fighting of the whole effort became orders of magnitude worse in later years.