CHAPTER 2
Today is the third day of our incredible conference titled “Orion Testing Symposium”. We are on parallel track 45 for the 2nd lecture of the day, which may contain traces of advertising.
Ladies, gentlemen and other forms of life and afterlife, today – surprise, surprise – we will be talking about gifts. Let’s welcome our guest lecturer, BlueCoeul, on a live feed from the yellow planet Eta 6a.
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Projection in space and the minds of all guests begins.
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You must be thinking this is a weird title for a lecture. To find out how to test gifts, we’ll first talk about what they are and why we give them. We will then present our unique new testing service and how it can save you a lot of headaches. We will also look at other options on the testing market. Even if your budget does not stretch to the right gift, you will get a lot of inspiration for various gift ideas to surprise your beloved girl or pigeon (it’s very important to have a good relationship with them!) We have very little time and lots to cover, so let’s get on with it!
Gift-giving goes as far back as intelligent life itself. For example, the small amoeba pig farmers from Neptu Kri 12 don’t give gifts. Gifts can vary in size and meaning. From a stone nicely cut by hand into the shape of a coffee maker to a little vegan dinosaur skull (ideal for decorative purposes in your new cave home). You can give it as an expression of loyalty/ass-kissing/concealed (or obvious) pursuit for benefits to your king, tsar, emperor, president, accountant, manager (after missing a deadline), spouse, mistress or any other higher form of life.
In other words, it is something typical for humans, and less so for programmers who quite often are engrossed in some other problem and don’t see the point in bothering. It’s not characteristic of all forms of life. But we can conclude it’s one of the things that defines us as human. If we don’t do it, does that make us less human or more like small amoeba pig farmers? Perhaps it does?
In some ages, it was good practice to accompany the gift with a description of your successes and achievements. Like, for example, a true conquistador conquering new lands in strange jungles and fighting ginormous anacondas and other bizarre known or unknown life forms. It’s best to exaggerate wildly when telling a story, to include some woman or another, even if imaginary, and to use the verb ‘avoid’ at least 15 times (emphasising that your local deity helped you a lot on the path to success, meaning you’re marked by fate, i.e. God’s man). Even if you don’t get what you wanted from the life form receiving the gift + the description, but you have made enough of an effort – you might have written a rather good novel, securing yourself a place in history, but still die a poor man. It’s just rare for a novel to become famous while you’re alive, especially if you really have battles with anacondas and have to write about it afterwards.
If you’re just a programmer who’s botched the latest release, do your best to try to prove that someone didn’t give you the right specifications, that the deadlines were impossible to meet and maybe that the blonde tester girl Pepi was having tea with the other programmer when she should have been checking your handiwork. If you do a really good job, you might even convince the mark that despite all the problems, you’ve included other extra goodies that were intended for some future release. You might also get a bonus in the end, who knows (you are possibly God’s man, after all)! If not, it’s not all been for nothing anyway – you had a chance to practice your writing and persuasion skills, which are always useful when you’re up the proverbial creek without a paddle. To ensure we’re following the rules of the Instangrill Convention, so we are not sued for discrimination, we’d like to point out that the aforementioned advice may also be true for QA engineers who’ve somehow missed this very important bug, because they didn’t write down their test cases, thinking they can remember more than 7 scenarios in their heads.
For those of you who haven’t heard of the Instangrill Convention, I’ll give you some more details now, in keeping with the good presentation practices! After many years of depression, neurosis and psychological torment inflicted on the minds of all programmers, one of them decided to try to end this nightmare. A recurring nightmare where the programmer hears the steps of someone approaching in the dark. A rumble echoes and then a tester with a notebook full of bugs suddenly appears from around the corner and starts making fun of the poor coder. There have been so many cases of suicide, overdoses with pills and dyed hair. So, this programmer, whose name we don’t even know because of the personal data protection law, sued all testers in Burstras and won the case after many poor programmers told their stories of psychological abuse. Thus was born the Instangrill Convention, which protects the rights to equality and peace of mind of all programmers. To go with that, subsidies were also disbursed to cover the cost of visiting a psychoanalyst and buying medication.
There are also cultures where gifts are given to win over a woman or a man. At one point, women were the ones getting presents, but now everything is upside down. One tebi before the wedding, the man is made to lie down in a hut and is forbidden from leaving. The hut may be replaced with a sofa, mattress or wooden floor covered with fur from vegan goats. The idea is to put on as much weight as possible. Yes, in many places, several layers of fat or other type of slime are considered kismet and luck ensuring your offspring won’t get sick or have a heart attack. The power of the Secret and positive thinking in full force! We will now speak professionally and continue the story. The idea is for the woman to bring a gift after the man has given her one – usually things to eat, such as meatballs, cakes, something greasy, basically things to feed the ‘soul’. The ultimate goal is to be able to call him ‘bear’ after 1 tebi. Because on this planet called KEN, all the women had a bear fetish – don’t ask me why, I’m no shrink. But if you were to ask Freud, he’d probably say the women on this planet had daddy issues, something unfulfilled in their childhood, and were now trying to resolve them through their future husband. With all these gifts, the man was supposed to feel like the neighbourhood merman. Every gift strengthens the emotional bond, even in the absence of love and sexual attraction. If you happen to get a sand clock with 2 marble hands and a brooch, you get a bonus of 2 x the current score.
You’ll say, “But where’s the love?” What a disappointing world! But science is science. As far back as 152.4 tebis, Beriliy deduced his famous formula for the relationship between emotional attachment and gifts.
Х - emotional attachment
а - love or lack thereof
К - number of gifts
N - the money you’ve spent
As we have already said, in this universe, there are quite a few unexplained phenomena, but there is a pretty logical explanation in this case. Each month, KEN Power Distribution would leave a small note next to the electricity bill saying, “We apologise for any inconvenience caused!” Along with the new version of city lighting, a malicious bug was released 55 tebis ago. It caused such havoc on the planet that men’s and women’s roles reversed. So now women feed men, rather than the other way around.
Even if you’re one of those aforementioned programmers who think gift-giving is a waste of time and social pressure, think again – you have a lot of money to blow and too many scarves. Later, you’ll want to fly in a nice public transport ship to your office, but taxes are not high enough. With every gift, even if tactless or dumb, you’ll help raise some corporation’s stock price and save the job of some small djondjonbolche, toiling away in the dark in one of KraKra’s millions of mines and factories. Do you not care about the fate of the little djondjonbolches?! Don’t be hard-hearted and send a text to 324 (we may overcharge you a little). Help the ‘local’ economy prosper! Save a djondjonbolche from hunger!
Maybe I’ve convinced you of how nice it is to give presents. That’s true, but only if you choose the right gift.
It’s a good practice to tell personal stories in presentations. I’ll now tell you one such story – how the idea of the service came to me after visiting a fortune-teller who read roasted pumpkins.
There are also rival services where you’re going in Proteklo 7r. The place has many clans of female shamans who see the future in roasted pumpkins. You bring them pumpkin pie or simply a toasted pumpkin with thick skin – they eat it and, depending on how they feel, they can ‘possibly’ predict whether your girl will like her gift. We’re mentioning this option, so you don’t say that all we’re doing is advertising our unique service.
I was wondering what to give the blonde mermaid I’d met at a submarine bar on IrRiQuadrant in 0.12. (which is, by the way, a very chic place with elegant green bamboo-shoot lamps and the only seaweed elderberry wine in the galaxy). There, I instantly fell in love with the beauty I mentioned (turns out the stories about mermaids are true… and like a wretched sailor I was captivated). I had to figure out what to give her as part of the wooing process. That’s why I travelled 300 light tebis to the Propeklo 7r, R as in Rper – the birthplace of all railroaders (an ancient profession), where a strange priestess worked (my saying strange is no accident, because she was a combination of a teapot, coffee maker and an evil pigeon – as we all know, not everything in this universe has a simple explanation and nature sometimes likes to make such jokes). The pumpkin said I should give her the skeleton of a cat that had jumped from the Roogos 5 skyscraper, but it had to have done it voluntarily while eating a donut. (To be honest, this was a hard-to-find gift.) I’d heard that people collect skeletons of various living organisms like mussels, snails and the like, but who would hang a cat skeleton on the window? As you can guess, this was a rather inappropriate gift, after the giving of which I only just managed to take off from the planet, where they wanted to sue me for illegal treasure hunting and cat corpse desecration. So you’re best off giving small zombie cows – all women enjoy them! Who wouldn’t want an immortal animal beside her? Another advantage is that it doesn’t shed hair. And if you set it up properly, it’ll wake you up early in the morning with mooing or licking. This gene modification, like cacti in much larger quantities, absorbs radiation. If you live on Proxima 5b, you can even get your radioactive modification because you most likely feed on radiation and you’ll be able to save money on uranium pills. But the small imaginary fish cannibal is also a very modern and, at the same time, unpretentious gift. You put the fish in a glass of methane and, out of pure joy, it eats itself and disappears into an imaginary plane, but before doing so, it recites a poem by Shakespeare and jumps on its fin three times.
The smarter way is to keep track of what the woman will say when you go to the mall. But you have to be careful because women are born QA engineers, even if it’s not their job, because sometimes they might only feint to see if you’ll take the bait. They’re very tricky, and indeed – as on planet S0m – the woman, if she doesn’t like the gift – not only will she not stay with you, but she will feed you to her pet crocodiles and then drink you as a smoothie.
To save you unnecessary headaches, we’ll test your gift especially for you. This service comes from the creators of the Collection of Personalities galactic social network – 37th version of the popular old social network. Since your entire personality is already on their servers, from what kind of meatball you’ve eaten, how far your ears pricked up when you saw a top model on the Hoholulu beach (one of the hottest places for sky surfing under the blue star). There, you can share and experience the emotions of others. If you accidentally accept the default settings, all the built-in sensors in your body begin to transmit a huge data stream. If, like usual, your girlfriend doesn’t get high-tech and has accepted the 1,278 pages of terms and conditions when registering at the age of 3 tebis, she definitely didn’t prohibit the sharing and resale of all those data to third parties, companies and corporations . All perfectly legal, of course! Everyone can stop the collection of those data. But don’t worry, my perfect-gift-seeking friends, we’ve made sure this option is so deeply buried in 5,690 menus on our system that even with the greatest resolve, you’d need a professional gold-digger to find it.
If you use our professional subscription service, we’ll continuously monitor all the wishes of the woman beside you and tell you what she longs for. In the Ultimate professional version, we can upgrade everything and we’ll send gifts from anonymous admirers, which will be small, unpretentious, but will be able to check if there is an interest you’re not aware of. This is perfect if you want to go out with a sultry girl you don’t know very well yet.
In our basic package, we also offer a cheaper testing option. Choose 10 gifts – if you can’t think of that many, we have a checklist of the most common gifts you can choose from (face mask from anaconda-cheetah from the mountains of Gerpi, foundation makeup from Gregoyan hermaphrodite frog or our constant bestseller – small zombie cow). There are two paid options. Option one: we pay social network developers and they send low-level subconscious enquiries/questionnaires to 100 random women on our system. They will dream of a leather bag from small goats or necklaces and, depending on what they feel, we’ll record it. All results will be averaged. In our even cheaper version, we use our gift idea analysts, and if you tell us a little about the woman beside you, they’ll pretend they’re her and tell you what they think. (It’s a lot cheaper because they work remotely on intergalactic highways, so we save a lot on office space).
As an additional service and as training for our algorithms, we can also use an alternative approach. You bring your girlfriend to us under the pretence of going to a romantic weekend. She’ll lie down on a couch and we’ll ask her a bunch of questions (typical psychoanalysis). Don’t worry – she won’t remember anything after a small dose of hypnosis (it may contain traces of peanut butter and radiation). For another 5 cryptocredits, we’ll even replace the experience with a memory of you two together on a Hoholulu beach.
The end of the presentation has come. But only for you and only now, you can use the promo code – “SMALL_ZOMBIE_COW_ORION_CONF” to get an incredible 50% discount. If you do so in the next 30 minutes, you’ll get a small imaginary cannibal fish free of charge. Thanks!
Testing in the Galaxy- Chapter 1- “The Testing Symposium Orion”
Testing in the Galaxy- Chapter 6: Virus testing, hacking today and more
Testing in the Galaxy- Chapter 7: Testing the Tourism and Consulting Services
