The origins of the ARRG policy as set forth in correspondence between the Mermaid Queen and my wife, Maryly, a.k.a. Staff with Standards, in my upcoming, block-buster Book, Shirley! You Jest!:
Hi, MermQ,
I have often experienced the strange phenomena of spending quite a bit of time writing a piece I congratulate myself on as being oh-so-clever, only to find that the next day when I read it again with fresh eyes, I don't like it AT ALL. It is humbling. It can be mortifying. Others may try to comfort and reassure with nice words of, "Oh, no, really, it is a good piece of work," but that doesn't matter if YOU the AUTHOR don't like it anymore.
It is risky to distribute things hot off the presses of the mind. But if everyone let every communication sit for a day or two in order to reconsider its brilliance and merits, well, we'd all be sitting around twice as long waiting to hear from each other!
So let us adopt a new policy, the Author's Right to Retract because he/she now considers it Garbage policy, which we will affectionately dub the ARRG Policy (up to the individual if a pirate accent is included while announcing that he/she is invoking the policy). It is a No Questions Asked policy. The policy goes like this: Author announces he is invoking ARRG. Readers respond with gracious attitude of, "Say no more. It never happened." It is then their Duty to delete all copies they have (unless it is evidence in a crime investigation, of course, but we don't expect that to happen). Author may keep his/her copies if he/she wishes.
We do this with photographs we take. If we see we have taken an unflattering photo or we hear that someone doesn't like how they look in a photo of ours, it's history, kaput, destroyed forever with no record kept, no questions asked, happy to accommodate (even if WE wickedly think it is funny and would like to have it--it's a matter of personal honor and respect of our photographic subjects, unless they think it is funny too, but that is rare and usually only happens with guys). We wish everyone would do this for us, too, but then there would be almost NO photos of me for the last several years, which would be perfectly fine with me. Just last night I saw photos my niece displayed online that included some she took of me when she was visiting at Christmas, and they are absolutely DEPLORABLE! I adore my niece, but the girl needs lessons in how to take flattering photographs and to know when to destroy ones not up to snuff! But I digress.
I hope this meets with your approval. By tomorrow I may wish I hadn't made harsh reference to my niece's photographic judgment, but I don't want to wait till then to send this.
Love,
Staff with Standards
