"Sure I do -- and so's the Queen!"

I explained to the dealer in Freemont I'd only make the trip down there if I could drive the car back. He agreed. I took the train back.

I asked an artist on Fiverr to draw me a fox statue. He drew me a fox.

I've had so many conversations lately in which I explain what it is I am looking for, and I get back a reply that indicates they either didn't understand or didn't even bother to listen.

"I am looking for a movie for tonight. Anything but horror."

"Here are the horror movies you wanted, sir."

And you don't even want to know my conversations with my (ahem) "Primary Care Physician."

Okay, sure, I speak a bookish English, complex sentence structures, less familiar idioms. But English is constructed on the sentence. You can not make a less ambiguous English sentence by stripping out everything but noun and verb.

"Eat car" is not in any way less confusing or more straightforward than saying, "we should take the car to somewhere to eat."

Yes, I will take blame for not being easy to understand. But there is a hell of a lot more blame for people who are overworked, but more, fucking lazy. Who don't want to deal with anything more complicated than "third shelf on the left" as the necessary reply.

Almost every person I've interacted with at Fiverr has been all about figuring out the smallest, most limited box they can possibly fit my requirements into -- the box that looks the most like every other box they have done that month.

"I've written a heroic-age fantasy taking place around the great city of Hattusa..."

"Okay, urban fantasy. Here's my dude-in-trench-coat-with-wand book cover. Thank you for your order!"

Except actually my fox guy. He's now done two images for me that were absolutely wonderful and exactly what I wanted. It just took a little longer to get him to go back to the actual order instead of what he had decided to remember about the order while he was working on something else.

***

Oh, and none of my Pubby reviewers have convinced me they actually read the book. One of them turned in a review some 6-8 hours after grabbing a copy. Sus! I will give them one more chance...I'm switching to KDE so there will be a page-by-page track. I won't be able to confirm they read the book, but if I get a total of fifty page reads and a completed review...I'm going to raise hell at Pubby.