LOS ANGELES—After being given the impossible task of revising the ubiquitous placeholder text that begins with “lorem ipsum,” which is used solely for mockups, a senior writer/editor in the marketing department of a billion-dollar tech company was fired after his manager raged that his 84th draft didn’t make any sense—despite the fact that filler copy is intentionally unintelligible.
Grigor Dahl, who had been employed by the company for almost nine years, says that at first he hoped his boss’s request to edit the dummy text was a joke, though she had never been known for her sense of humor. In fact, he says, she has a well-deserved reputation in the company for being mercurial and even displays strong narcissistic personality traits. He recounts that she once demanded he find a “variant of ‘cybersecurity’ to show how innovative the company is.” After rejecting the 13 alternatives he found in the thesaurus and other references, she ended up using “cybersecurity,” condescendingly explaining that he took “variant” much too literally. Still, he says, the request to edit filler copy seemed absurd and outrageous even for her, so he was optimistic it wasn’t a real task. But when no one on the nearly 40-person team of copywriters, editors, graphic designers, and other professionals blinked during the call when she assigned it to him, he knew she was serious. “The first thing I did,” he says, “is try to figure out what the gibberish even means.” That led him to a host of websites, including the first one that comes up in a Google search and which is actually devoted to the purposely and purposefully meaningless text.
But not wanting to assume anything, Dahl says he spent a couple days confirming what that dedicated site states, which is that the filler text starting with “lorem ipsum” has been around for decades and maybe even centuries and is supposed to be gobbledygook, with its only real purpose to mimic the visual and spatial characteristics of words. In fact, he says, it only works as dummy text if it does not have meaning because, if the words were comprehensible, the viewer would then be distracted by trying to actually read them. After those findings, he then wondered whether his boss was simply using the assignment as a test to see how creative, agile, motivated—and about 52 other corporate buzzwords his company uses to measure employee performance—he was. So, he took the task to heart and mind and even body, at one point spending a weekend carving some of the words out of wood to see if 3D versions might reveal something he was missing.
Yet, no matter the dimensionality, fonts, kerning, “translations,” or even substitutions with brand-new placeholder text in English (including, ironically, one based on a Pulitzer Prize–winning story on filler text he found), his boss grew increasingly agitated—angry even—with each revision. “After she emailed my fifth or sixth or thirtieth or whatever draft back with a vomiting emoji,” he says, “I apologized yet again and asked her if she could please provide some specific feedback. Her reply was, well, lorem ipsum placeholder text.” As most writers are eternal optimists, he says he thought her response might hold a clue, so he deconstructed it line by line to try to find some meaning. And he continued sending her revision after revision until, about three months later, he was terminated for unsatisfactory performance. Though he says he wishes he could have given her what she wanted and misses the steady paycheck, he also says he is glad to be out from under an implacable boss who once exploded in anger when he couldn’t find a three-letter word starting with “R” meaning “decentralized blockchain network capability.” She felt, he says, that three letters and the capital “R” in the corporate font worked best in the ad’s design, never mind that there is no such word to convey the same meaning. With empathy in his voice, he says he found out recently that she reassigned the lorem ipsum revision to one of his former colleagues. “Caveat auctor,” he whispers, before concluding, “a non-win situ—and that’s no gibberish.”
