The Unicode Chronicles — Chapter 4

The Variable That Spoke in Tongues

The Unicode Chronicles is a collection of humorous fiction short stories. Any resemblance to real-life events or individuals is purely coincidental.

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Marcelo spotted the ticket just as he was about to close his laptop for the evening:

[URGENT] Product name not rendering in Finnish. Placeholder {productName} showing in production.
Owner: Not Assigned. Origin: Possibly CMS? Possibly divine?

He sighed. These weren’t real bugs, these were localization ghosts. {productName} was clearly meant to be injected somewhere. But where it lived? That was metaphysical.

The string itself was translated correctly in the .po file:
{productName} is here for you.
In Finnish, this became:
{productName} on täällä sinua varten.

Which would’ve been fine, except the Finnish site literally displayed that exact sentence, curly braces and all. Like the language had developed an attitude and refused to play along.

Marcelo’s first instinct was to ping Anil, the engineer who once described himself as “the last human interface between Marketing and the Source Code.” Anil replied with a Confluence link titled “Temporarily Permanent Workarounds for L10n Hell.” It led, of course, to a 404.

He tried again. This time, Anil’s Slack status read: On Leave.

The company HR bot sent Marcelo the banner: ☀️ "Community Day is here. Doing Good = Feeling Great!"

Marcelo traced the variable upstream. The name was supposed to be fetched via API from an internal system called NameFrame, built during the Brand Refresh Era of 2021. It was once maintained by BrandingOps, which later dissolved into GrowthOps, which was then reabsorbed into Strategic Initiatives—a department that currently consisted of just one guy named Paul in Legal.

Paul said the product name was trademarked and must never be translated.
Marketing said it must always be localized, per the Q2 Global Consistency Guidelines.
The translation vendor sent back a ZenDesk reply:

“We translated it because it was in the file. ¯\(ツ)/¯”

Marcelo opened the CMS, a Drupal instance so ancient it had a MySpace share button still wired in.
There was a toggle: Force English Value (Beta).
No one knew what “Beta” referred to. Possibly a 2018 experiment. Possibly a trap.

Design filed a bug:

“Finnish version breaks mobile layout if productName exceeds 12 characters.”
Marcelo stared at the screenshot. The layout was definitely broken. But more importantly, the product name was still missing.

He pinged Anil again. Slack: Away. Email: bounced.
He checked the internal wiki under “Backup Contact for Anil”:
Anil – (Out)
Marcelo – (YOU ARE HERE)

Localization chat threads erupted. Someone from EMEA asked:

“Is it expected behavior for five locales to have five entirely different names for the same product?”
A CSV was uploaded:
DO_NOT_USE_FINAL_v3.csv
It had twelve columns, no headers, and a first row that simply read:
“Discuss after relaunch freeze.”

Marcelo tried to assign the Jira ticket to Anil again.
Error: User not found.

Anil’s account had been deactivated.

Later, during a sparsely attended Zoom sync called “Post-Mortem: Finnish Placeholder Incident,” someone whispered:
Anil had been fired.

He was officially on company-approved leave, marked “Out of Office” in all systems. But the company’s Community Service Day participation tracker was automated. It simply scanned for selfie uploads, badge check-ins, or #ServiceDay Slack activity.

Anil did none of those.
He was on a beach in Sri Lanka, reading Murakami and drinking papaya juice.
The system flagged him as “Non-Participant.”
The policy bot triggered a low-priority HR workflow.
Three approvals later—none human—he was gone.

HR later called it “a regrettable but fully compliant automation event.”

The ticket was closed the next morning.
Resolution: “By design. Won’t fix. Owner unclear. See branding.”

On the live Finnish site, {productName} still floats like an unanswered question.

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The end.

Or maybe not. Variables rarely die. They just relocate.