Skinitizer. That's one that occurred to me a few minutes ago. All of those "no water needed" hand sanitizers? Skinitizers! As opposed to scanitizers--those security machines in the airport that puff air at you to see what you've stepped in if you're a suicidal terrorist. Earlier today I was webitizing graphics for the internet!

I don't usually spend my work hours making up words, but today I got stuck doing "phone relief" for the receptionist twice, an hour each time. Mostly I did work, honestly, but my mind did wander occasionally.

Why, you might wonder, was Anne's mind wandering?

Well, you've heard of "vaporware," right? It's imaginary product. Sales people refer to any product they're being asked to sell that isn't actually in production yet as "vaporware." And what do programmers call software that either doesn't have code written or is written but does not work? Vaporware, of course. I think software developers invented the word.

Today I've been working on my own version of vaporware--a vaporsite. I was asked to write up a site map for our new website.

Now, since we're still fighting out what our core products and services are, we haven't gotten the go-ahead for the Ask A Question or blog features, I can't find any two people who agree of what our major markets are and/or should be, and the new "customer log-in" section is more of a concept than a plan--well, as you might imagine, I'm having a little trouble putting together a flow chart that lays out the site's content.*

We don't have any content. I have four amazingly nonspecific "keywords" and a lot of differing opinions on what it is the Argonuts actually do--or should be doing.

Anyhow. I designed (hah!) a layout so that I could stare at the imaginary menu bars and theorize on what kind of conceptual content we might eventually decide to maybe include.

I wrote. I crossed out. I played around with graphics and font colors. I rewrote. I changed all the line spacing. I highlighted. I drew lines from one place to another. I wrote "whatever" in four places. I got a fresh piece of paper and wrote it all out again. I crossed out more stuff. I added new sections. I stared at it all for a while.

Then I made up words for twenty minutes while I ate lunch. Sadly, I was unable to come up with a suitable combination of "vapor" and "itizer" to describe the process. The closest I got was "vaporizer" which has the disadvantage of being a real word already and, if you think about it, sounds ominously martial anyhow.

This afternoon I have to turn all of my smoke-and-mirrors into a tidy flowchart that can be used to convince a casual (and hopefully inattentive) audience that we not only have a Major Plan, but we've made Significant Progress on it.

I swear, if it wasn't for the fact that writing about nothing at all is one of my major skills? I'd be sitting under the desk crying softly by now. (And there's no need to try and be "interesting" in a site map, so I'm golden all the way.)

Happy Friday!


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* No, the current site does not have a site map that I can copy and alter appropriately. They've never done a site map before.