Tuesday (05/30/06)
So after much consideration… 5:24 pm
A few months ago I started a thread over at SitePoint asking opinions on what majors people felt were the most helpful in graphic design and web development careers. I got well over one hundred responses with suggestions ranging from general arts to business to skipping college all together. I heavily thought upon all of this and after much consideration have decided to go with none of these suggestions.
Instead, I have decided to major in Greek. That, I believe, is where the real money lies.
Greek? Are you crazy?
Not at all. Think about it: What is one of today’s biggest buzzwords? Beta. What language is this word? Why, Greek, of course.
Developers today are absolutely terrified of launching an actual full release. That is why we’ve invented alpha and beta releases–this way there is always an emergency excuse ready. Lately, however, things have been taken even further. With the recent redesign of Flickr, Gamma was introduced.
So?
Pretty soon Greek majors are going to be needed just to pronounce these new versions, and having a professional Greek-speaking guy on every development team will be a must.
With this 24-letter alphabet at our disposal, startups will no longer have to be responsible for bugs in the first 24 versions! As you can tell, we are very excited about this. Soon conversations with customer support will be going something like the following:
Complaining Customer: Your product is a piece of @!#%!!! I’ve already found approximately 137.8 bugs in it.
Support: What did you expect? This is only the Lambda release after all.
Complaining Customer: What the hell is “Lambda”?
But that’s not all. No, things will get even better than this:
Support: “Lambda” is the 11th letter in the Greek alphabet, marking our 11th release. In other words, we haven’t launched an official, full product yet. Would you like to talk to our in-house Greek Expert?
Complaining Customer: BS.
Support: Yes, I believe he got his degree last year.
I eat food. I listen to music. I sleep. Sometimes. I drink lots of coffee. I make pretty pictures. I talk to people. I believe in things. I write stuff. I take photographs. I have a laughing addiction. I am human. 
Are you serious?
Check the last thing I tagged this post with.
Holy shit! Oliver, did you not get one hint of sarcasm in that post… (I guess it is kinda hard to read sarcasm…)
Anyways, Elliot, you had me on the floor pissing my pants. Great post man.
Oh man now I feel really dumb.
I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean it that way. The “holy shit” was at how funny the article was really. I worded that comment totally wrong.
Haha no worries. It didn’t occur to me the slightest hint of sarcasm. I’m bad at that.
@Steven: Thanks, glad you found it funny.
@Oliver: Don’t worry about it. I thought I might get a few people thinking I was serious; it’s sorta hard to portray something like that via text. I almost did it via a podcast, but it would’ve been harder to do the conversations.
Ok… It really wasn’t that funny… Looks like you did have fun writing it though…
Hillarious…. although likely not too far from the truth. Gamma… is only the beginning (or at least the 3 from the start).
@Logan: Indeed, it was quite fun. Haven’t had that much fun blogging for quite some time.
@James: Thanks man.
Glad to know you enjoyed it.
Don’t forget abot Lorem Ipsum! That would be useful, too.
Well, Adam, “Lorem Ipsum” is Latin, not Greek, so no, it wouldn’t.
Then heck, I’ll take Latin, too.
Tell people to stop calling it “greeking,” then, it gets confusing.
Havent chuckled so much at a blog article in weeks
Great Stuff
Excellent! I used to think that my degree in Ancient Greek was more of a hindrance than a help when it came to the job market. Now I can see that I’m actually ahead of the game!
I wonder what happens when they get to the 25th release. Omega-Alpha, perhaps?
My guess is that when they get to the 25th release it would go to Omega 1.0, and keep up that convention until they felt comfortable enough to actually launch something
@Steve: Thanks.
@Josiah & James: It would probably end up something like “ΑΩ2.0.” Start using the symbols, and don’t forget the oh-so-amazing “2.0″ in there.
LOL… hillarious. I can see this catching on!
That’s very funny! You could probably come up with some very cool names to like Athropodagrapher (a text editor for the Web)…
I dont think Flickr introduced Gamma, they just made it well known.
http://blog.devshop.com/articles/2006/04/13/i-shall-call-it-theta
Ha ha… Nice one Elliot! Made me chuckle just before I go to bed… now I am going to have odd greek dreams instead of odd code dreams!
Tell people to stop calling it “greeking,” then, it gets confusing.