The final final file name, and the hope buried in it

At 23:40 the deck is done. You save it as report_final.pdf, and the word is doing real work. It means: I am going to bed.

Then the boss reads it. The comments come, there are eleven of them, and they are all fair. You fix them. Now you need a new name, and the old one is taken by a file that is no longer true. So you reach for capitals. report_FINAL_final.pdf. The capitals are not ornament. They are an argument with yourself about whether you meant it the first time.

Then the client wants one little change to slide four. You add a version number to the word final. report_final_v2.pdf. A file name that promises there will be no more versions, numbered, in case there are.

So what does final_v2 mean? It means the person naming the file no longer believes the word, but has nothing better to put there. Nobody sits down and resolves to name files this way. The names just pile up. Each one is typed later in the night than the last, by a more tired person.

Jorge Cham, who draws the strip PhD Comics, got the whole sequence down in one go. His strip from October 2012 traces a single document as a supervisor keeps handing it back, and the names it collects on the way tell the story better than any description of them could. The strip credits the idea to Matt from UCLA. Here is the document's full career:

And boy has the "thing" you are renaming at midnight been around a long time! PowerPoint 1.0 shipped for the Macintosh in April 1987, made by a startup called Forethought. Microsoft bought it three months later for $14 million. Four decades on, it has got very good at remembering everything you ever did to it, and no better at all at telling you when to stop.

One company say they solved it. In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote that Amazon does not do slide presentations. Meetings open with a six-page narrative memo, and everyone in the room reads it in silence before anyone speaks. "A kind of study hall", he called it. No deck, no slide four, no client asking for one little change to it. What there is instead is a document that somebody finished late and had to give a name to before they could go home. That's what they say, at least. I wouldn't bet on there not being any slides at Amazon. But the thought is nice isn't it.

So, what's the summary. I say it's that "Final" is typed by whoever in the building most wants the work to be over, and it describes their evening rather than the document. The deck did not get more final at 01:00. The hope just got renamed, in capitals, and then numbered.