Martian talk

This morning I was on the phone with a customer service representative about emails I was getting from an insurance company and which were clearly meant for someone else with a similar name (fortunately nothing earth-shaking, but still something this person would probably like to know about).  As is usually the case, the reply address was a bit bucket, but there were a couple of options in the body of the email: a phone number and a link.  I'd gone with the phone number.

The customer service rep politely suggested that I use the link instead.  I chased the link, which took me to a landing page for the insurance company.  Crucially, it was just a plain link, with nothing to identify where it had come from*.  I wasn't sure how best to try to get that across to the rep, but I tried to explain that usually there are a bunch of magic numbers or "hexadecimal gibberish" on a link like that to tie it back to where it came from.

"Oh yeah ... I call that 'Martian talk'," the rep said.

"Exactly.  There's no Martian talk on the link.  By the way, I think I'm going to start using that."

We had a good laugh and from that point on we were on the same page.  The rep took all the relevant information I could come up with and promised to follow up with IT.

What I love about the term 'Martian talk' is that it implies that there's communication going on, but not in a way that will be meaningful to the average human, and that's exactly what's happening.

And it's fun.

I'd like to follow up at some point and pull together some of the earlier posts on Martian talk -- magic numbers, hexadecimal gibberish and such -- but that will take more attention than I have at the moment.


* From a strict privacy point of view there would be plenty of clues, but there was nothing to tie the link to a particular account for that insurance company, which was what we needed.