I remember reading about this little trick when I was maybe ten years old:
Address a letter to a friend. But instead of writing your home address on the upper-left corner of the envelope and your friend’s home address in the middle, reverse them. Send the letter with no stamp. The postal service returns the letter to the sender’s address—unwittingly sending it to the destination you wanted to anyways, free of charge! (I tried this a couple times with my friend Tom and it worked. Caveat: We lived only a few towns away.)
A few years later, I learned of another trick.
When calling from a payphone collect, instead of speaking your name when prompted by the operating service, quickly rattle off your message: “Pickmeupfromschool!”. On the other end, my mother would be asked if she’d like to accept charges from “Pickmeupfromschool!” and of course would decline.
And that is how—for years—I would call home to get picked up from school free of charge.
Craftiness—using a system in a way the system wasn’t intended to be used. Living within the rules to achieve the very thing the rules were intended to fend off.
I love craftiness. I admire its ingenuity. Its creativity. Its masterful work within the constraints. At times, its irreverence. Its aspiration to do the impossible or the weird or simply the interesting with what we have that most of us can’t (or don’t aspire) to see.
I especially love seeing this on the web—a medium where, like any medium, conformity often rules. Except on the web, conformity naturally spreads and multiplies faster. For me, that makes finding craftiness even more special.
I enjoy finding the people that are on the constant search for craftiness.
The person that turned CAPTCHA into a game or used AI to make an unbounded game of word associations.
Or the guy that, during the pandemic, revived a little word game he made years earlier that eventually seemingly everyone on earth was playing.
And the fella that took that little word game and figured out how to play a version of it on Firefox’s search bar.
Or the one who pointed out an interesting byproduct of an early iPhone feature.
And the person who took that idea and then decided to build a nearly infinite online time capsule of that period (and also figured out a different way to send mail for less than a postage stamp).
I love the delightful, crafty stuff that can be made with the raw materials of the web. I love the exercise of observing the mundane and turning it on its head. Unearthing gems from places where most of us don’t see anything unusual.
Let’s keep finding it.
Let’s do it with benign intentions.
Let’s keep making more of it.