| 1. | subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion: an arbitrary decision. |
| 2. | decided by a judge or arbiter rather than by a law or statute. |
| 3. | having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government. |
| 4. | capricious; unreasonable; unsupported: an arbitrary demand for payment. |
| 5. | Mathematics. undetermined; not assigned a specific value: an arbitrary constant. |
These are some emotive definitions, right? And apparently arbitrary events can be extremely irritating. A job interview that is only offered at one specific time, which happens to be at the very time when you need to be on the other side of the country. User names you are given over which you have no control, especially when they have a vulgar connotation. A computer fault which means you may or may not have access to the Internet.
In fact none of these events are arbitrary, as such. There are valid reasons for them to occur. Interestingly, computers may be involved in all these situations. The computer is simply folowing the instructions with which it has been programmed, leading to a situation which is not ideal for somebody. The 'computer says no' scenario. We have checked our records and you do not exist.
A computer can easily allocate user names according to a certain rule. In the case of the Computer Science Department here at Queen Mary, the first two letters of your first name, the first letter of your last name and an integer are concatenated. My username is therefore sil1. Quite reasonable and appropriate, in fact better than my real name, no? short, sweet and impossible to confuse with sil2 or later sils. But what if my name was Sam Peterson? I'd be sap1, or, perhaps worse, sap2. How about Burton Moffat, Tim Taylor or Vanessa Gordon (the sixth).
Ok, I'll stop making people up now. I know ruts and peds and various other slightly uncomfortable (to me) user names. I'm sure that if you really had a problem with your name, you could change it, the people here are very nice.
The point I'm making is that actually, there is nothing arbirary about the process of allocating names. I expect a lot of thought went into choosing the appropriate format. At least the names are short, and quite easy to remember. My general username for the university is much more of a headful - ac06187. It took me quite a while to remember it, and on the library helpdesk I often encountered people who had forgotten theirs.
Likewise, decisions made by people may appear arbitrary but are made according to rules applied by that person. They may not even be aware of the rules, and the rules may be as simple as 'I want to get home, so I'm going to go with the first timeslot I have available, without checking whether this fits with the other person's availability'. This is laziness. I recognise that a lot of the things I criticise as being arbitrary, are where a fellow human has not been prepared to negotiate; they have simply imposed a situation on me. It's that lack of communication, lack of care, which is frustrating.
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