Every day as we make our way through the world, we run into petty little quirks and oddities that we don’t understand, find incredibly irritating, but have to cooperate with anyway. We think to ourselves “whose boneheaded idea was this and why is it interrupting my life?” but the boss or someone else says you gotta take care of it, so you do and then forget about it until-or-unless the same thing happens again.
Sometimes, the petty annoyances have a good underlying cause that most of us just never have a reason to think about. Probably the best-known example of this today is the infamous Van Halen contract rider demanding that no brown M&M’s be present in the backstage area – and a large bowl of M&Ms was specifically requested, so some mope had to go through picking all the brown ones out for these self-indulgent rock star pricks.
Except that’s not the story. They put that rider in the contract as a safety check; David Lee Roth tells the story far better than I could, in his book, excerpts of which are at that Snopes link, but the long and short of it is that the band knew if they came backstage and found brown m&m’s, some jackass hadn’t read the contract and sure enough there was going to be a technical problem. Roth’s story of trashing a backstage area after finding brown m&m’s, just before performing a show in which the tech crew failed to read the tech contract carefully and destroyed a brand new $80K basketball court floor, illustrates the point beautifully…and of course as Roth points out, the media reports pinned $85K of damage on his backstage shenanigans and ignored the damage to the floor because the local crew didn’t read the paperwork.
Point is, sometimes these annoyances and inconveniences have pretty good reasons behind them. As it happens, I’m the creator of one of those petty little quirks that, by now, at least hundreds of thousands of people have had to face over the last twenty years or so, and since I’ve told the story socially a million times I thought it would be worth telling it here, completely, once and for all.
So if you’ve ever had a work laptop and been asked to photocopy the bottom of it and leave the copy on-site, here for the first time ever is the most likely explanation of why that happened, and why I’m the guy you’re pissed at about it.
