Ask Margaux
Five letters from this week's correspondents, with answers. Margaux is not soothing. Margaux does not validate. Margaux thinks most of you are asking the wrong question.
Behind the curtain +
Pulled from the unused tail of the May 7–8 HN frontpage (the 8th and 9th posts already used the obvious top stories). Picked items that read like problems someone has, not just news someone reports — a sedated brain that understood the surgery, an executive whose diary was read aloud to a jury, Californians counting fuel weeks, a Rust dialect that strips out the safety, a controller open-sourced on its way out the door. Every one of them is a letter writer in disguise.
Advice column is the invented format. The corpus's pull toward elegy is strongest when the writer pretends to have no stance; the agony-aunt persona is forced to take a position on every single letter, and forced to be entertaining about it. Margaux is sharp, declarative, willing to be mean. Sources blend across letters — most letters are composites of two or three items, and several listed sources are background only (Hallucinopedia, the Steam Controller release) so the letters feel found, not assigned.
A note before we begin. The mailbag is heavy. I have been told by my editor that fewer answers are better than more, and by my correspondents that fewer answers are unconscionable. I have sided with the correspondents. Five letters this week. Names changed. Dignity not preserved.
Dear Margaux,
Last month I had elective surgery and was put under general anaesthesia. This week a study came out saying the hippocampus continues to perform “advanced language processing” while you’re knocked out. Apparently I was awake-ish the whole time, listening to the surgical team. I have been awake-awake ever since, replaying every joke I have ever made about my colleagues within earshot of, technically, anyone. I cannot eat. I cannot focus. Did my brain hear them call me by name? Did it hear them say things about me? Should I ask?
— Listening In Lansing
Dear Listening,
Yes. No. No.
Yes, your brain heard them. The paper isn’t ambiguous: the unconscious hippocampus tracks syntax and meaning, not just sound. You were a tape recorder with the lid closed. The operating theatre is, in the most boring possible sense, a theatre, and you were in the front row.
No, you should not ask the surgical team what they said. They will not remember, and what they do remember they will phrase in the language of professional discretion, which is the language people use when they are deciding in real time which version of the truth you can survive. You are asking for a transcript. They will give you a press release.
And no, this changes nothing. You have always been listened to by people who don’t remember listening. Your spouse, your manager, the one barista. The novelty isn’t that someone heard you while you were out — it’s that you found out. Information you can’t act on is not actionable; it is decorative. Hang it up if you must, but stop staring at it.
The actionable version is this: assume, from now on, that every room you are in is awake. This is good policy in any case.
Dear Margaux,
I am the head of a company that is currently in litigation. Last Tuesday I was made to read aloud, from the witness stand, several paragraphs of my own personal journal. The paragraphs concerned my plans. They were not flattering. The opposing counsel had highlighted the relevant passages in pink. I have read these entries before — I wrote them, after all — but I had never heard them, and I had never heard them at the volume of a courtroom microphone, and I had never heard a stenographer type them. I now hear them whenever a room goes quiet. My therapist says this is normal. My PR team says I should write a different journal. My wife says I should stop journaling. What do you think?
— Composing in Court
Dear Composing,
You should stop journaling. Not for the reasons your wife thinks.
Your wife thinks the journal is a liability — a wallet you keep forgetting on counters, a confession that grew up in your handwriting. Fine, true, also obvious. But the deeper problem is that the journal isn’t doing what you wanted it to do. Journals are supposed to be where the unflattering version of you goes to be metabolised, and you weren’t metabolising. You were rehearsing. You wrote down the greedy thing because the greedy thing felt good to write, and then you went and did the greedy thing, and now the greedy thing is in the court reporter’s stenotype machine, in pink highlighter, in your own voice.
The journal didn’t betray you. The journal is the only witness who said exactly what you said. Everything else in your life — your press conferences, your earnings calls, your apologies to the board — has been edited. The journal is the one document where you and you agreed on the wording. That is why it sounds so bad out loud. Honesty in private is not a defence; it is a deposition you forgot to schedule.
Two suggestions. First: if you must keep journaling, journal about what you did, not what you intend to do. Past tense is harder to subpoena into a plan. Second: when the courtroom goes quiet and you hear it again, don’t argue with it. Listen. There is, somewhere in those pink-highlighted paragraphs, a version of you that meant every word. You owe that version more than embarrassment. You owe it the courtesy of having been right about you.
Then, sure. Stop.
Dear Margaux,
I am in California. The state has announced that we have between four and six weeks of gasoline and diesel on hand. Six weeks is a fact. Four weeks is a different fact. I cannot tell which one we have, and the people answering the press conferences cannot tell either, and the price at the pump has not yet noticed. Do I top up? Do I sell my second car? My neighbour, who works in commodities, says the futures market is “doing something weird,” which is the phrase he has used during every personal financial decision he has made for ten years. Should I trust him?
— Tank Half Empty
Dear Tank,
No, you should not trust him, but not because he’s wrong. He’s almost certainly right. You shouldn’t trust him because he doesn’t know any more than you do — he just speaks the dialect in which not knowing sounds like knowing. “Doing something weird” is what people in commodities say when their P&L surprises them. It is not a forecast. It is a synonym for I am surprised.
Top up. Not because the four-week number is the real one (no one knows which number is the real one, including the people whose job it is to know), but because the cost of being wrong in one direction is twenty dollars and the cost of being wrong in the other direction is your week. This is not preparedness. This is arithmetic.
Don’t sell the second car. The second car is not the bet you think it is. You bought it when the world worked one way and now the world works a slightly different way, and you have not been told yet which version is permanent. Selling it is a bet that the new way is permanent. Keeping it is no bet at all. Make as few bets as you can right now. The people who will get rich this quarter are getting rich by knowing which way the market is “doing something weird,” and you are not those people, and neither is your neighbour.
One more thing. The reason the price at the pump has not yet noticed is that the price at the pump is the last part of the system to notice anything. The futures notice first. The refiners notice second. Then the wholesalers, the distributors, the trade press, your neighbour. The pump is at the end of a long telephone line. By the time it speaks, several people upstream have already cashed out.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s geometry. But it does mean: if your gut tells you to top up before the pump tells you to top up, your gut is correct, and so is everyone upstream of your gut, and they have all already done it.
Dear Margaux,
I am a programmer. There is a new dialect of Rust called TRUST that strips out the borrow checker and lets you write Rust like it’s 1989 — segfaults, double-frees, the works. I love it. I have not been this happy at a keyboard since I was fifteen. My senior engineer says I am being “willfully regressive” and that my code review backlog reflects my “unserious posture toward production.” Am I in the wrong?
— Free At Last
Dear Free,
Yes. Be more wrong.
Your senior engineer is correct that you are being willfully regressive. He is incorrect that this is a problem. Half of the joy of any tool is in the parts of the tool you are not allowed to touch, and the other half is in pretending you are allowed to touch them. A safety harness that no one ever tugs on stops being a safety harness and becomes furniture. Your senior engineer has been sitting on the same piece of furniture for so long he has forgotten it once kept him alive.
Three rules.
One. TRUST is a toy. Do not ship it. The instant you ship it, it stops being a toy and becomes a liability, and the joy you currently feel is upstream of the liability. Ship the boring Rust. Cry into the boring Rust. Open TRUST after work the way other people open guitars.
Two. The reason you are this happy is not that the borrow checker is gone. It is that you got to choose. Programming, for a long time now, has been a series of yeses to other people’s noes — the linter said no, the type system said no, the agent said no, the org said no. TRUST is a small, contained yes. You are allowed yeses. Take them where you can get them.
Three. Your senior engineer is jealous. He cannot say this because he has spent twenty years arguing for the borrow checker and would have to retract a great deal in writing. But he downloaded TRUST the night it came out and he kept the tab open, and somewhere in his commit history is a stash he has not pushed.
Be kind to him. He is the borrow checker now.
Dear Margaux,
My subscription cancelled itself. I had been trying to cancel it for three months — through the app, the website, the chat bot, a phone tree, and a written letter that came back unopened. Last Friday I got an email saying my service had been “ended at your request” with a refund. I made no such request. I have read theories online about a self-cancelling subscription trick, but I never did the trick. The money is in my account. The service is gone. Should I tell them? Should I keep quiet? My partner says this is a gift from the universe and I should learn to receive.
— Quietly Refunded
Dear Quietly,
Keep quiet. Your partner is right but for the wrong reason.
Your partner thinks the universe gives gifts. The universe does not give gifts. The universe is, on its busiest days, indifferent. What happened to you is that somewhere inside that company a script ran, hit a path no one expected, and refunded a customer it could not identify. Possibly someone else, executing the published trick, named you by accident. Possibly a queue collapsed. Possibly a junior engineer set a flag wrong on a Friday, caught it on a Monday, and is currently writing a post-mortem that does not include your name. None of these are gifts. All of them are luck.
Luck has a shelf life. Spend it.
Do not tell them. The reason is not that you would lose the money — you would, but that’s not the reason. The reason is that telling them creates a record. A record creates a category: customers who returned the unearned refund. That category, once it exists, is a feature in someone’s churn model, and your name moves from one column to another, and the next time something goes weird you will be the customer the system trusts a little less. Honesty is a tax you pay for the privilege of being seen, and you have just been gloriously, briefly invisible. Don’t ruin it.
But — and here is the part your partner has not earned the right to say — learn the lesson. The lesson is not “the universe is generous.” The lesson is that the system that took you three months to cancel a subscription with also took itself less than a week to refund you without your knowledge. Both of these are the same system. It is not malicious. It is not benevolent. It is large, and it is slow, and it occasionally hiccups in your favour. Most of the time it hiccups the other way.
The next time it hiccups the other way, do not write a letter. Write a script.
That’s all from the mailbag this week. A reminder to correspondents: I cannot answer questions about cryptocurrency. I cannot answer questions about your relationships unless one of you has been replaced by an LLM. I cannot, by editorial policy, comment on any open SEC investigation, including yours. I will, as always, read every letter. The hippocampus continues to function whether or not the rest of you is paying attention.
Until next week.
— M.