Maurice’s selected thoughts.

Several weeks ago I noticed that someone had written the phrase “Nobody likes a quitter.” on a white board in my office. I’ve been pondering this for quite some time now, and I have a few thoughts.

It seems like at least a few people would in fact like quitters. For example, the runner up in a contest comes to mind. Wouldn’t it be nice if just before winning the person in first place decided they couldn’t hack it anymore?

If your a quitter do you not like yourself? What about the guy that quit before you did? Seems like you’d always be telling yourself, “yeah I quit, but Joe quit first!”

What about all the attempted homicides? Sure maybe some of them are fuck ups that just didn’t do it right, but I’m sure there are a few that just quit before completing the task. I bet their victims are thankful for quitters.

Initially I wasn’t sure why someone had written this on my whiteboard. Was it an attack on my character? Had I in fact quit doing something? I’m sure I had, but was it something that I should not have quit? No, I’ve finally come to a conclusion. The person who scrawled those words was self loathing and full of guilt. They in fact quit after only telling part of the story. It may be true that some people do not like some quitters, but certainly not all people have a distaste for all quitters. Feeling remorseful in their inability to follow through on a train of thought they decided to declare to the world, or at least the subset of people in the world that enter my office, their distain for themselves.

I do have one alternative theory. I may have written this on my whiteboard myself, and simply forgot what I was doing. Of course the implications of that scenario go well beyond the scope of the current monologue.

You should never ask a geek what they are doing. Why? Well let us say for the sake of argument that you are not a geek. You are walking around and you see someone you know. They are a known geek. Let us also assume that the geek is using a computer. Now here are a few scenarios.

Scenario One

Non Geek: “What are you doing?”
Geek: “Well I’m reading Joel’s Blog, updating my blog, working on some code to translate a model in Java to a Matlab file, Googling for more information on Ruby and how it compares to Objective-C since I know Objective-C and would like to know more about Ruby, browsing through several RSS feeds, catching up on a few newsgroups, and answering a few important emails. Oh, and I’m also working on my server it needs an updated security certificate, there is an security update I want to install after todays backup runs, and I’m thinking of installing Postgres but I may just stick with MySQL. I don’t know, they both have strengths so I’ll probably use them both for different projects. Oh, I’m also researching a few different machine learning packages I want to look in to using as part of a project.”
Non Geek: “What?!”
Geek: “Never-mind, I’m just working.” Thinks: That doesn’t really do it justice though. I’m actually having a lot of fun. I can’t believe I get paid for this. HHHHAAAAAHHHHHAAAAAAAA!!!!
Non Geek: “OH! I see. So maybe I could ask you a question I have about Word?”
Geek: “I use LaTeX.”
Non Geek: “Do you mean latex? What does that have to do with Word?”
Geek: “Please stop talking to me.”

Scenario Two

Non Geek: “What are you doing?”
Geek: Last time I talked to Bob he asked me some stupid question about Word. I don’t even use Word. How can I avoid that? “I’m just working on the X project.”
Non Geek: “Oh, yeah. I hear that’s going to be huge for the company.”
Geek: “yep”
Non Geek: “So, I was wondering if I could ask you a question about Word?”
Geek: “I use LaTeX.”
Non Geek: “Do you mean latex? What does that have to do with Word?”
Geek: “Please stop talking to me.”

Scenario Three

Non Geek: “What are you doing?”
Geek: Last time I talked to Bob he asked me some stupid question about Word again. I don’t even use Word, he ought to know by now. How can I avoid this again? Maybe if I just sit real still and pretend I didn’t hear anything.
Non Geek: “So, I was wondering if I could ask you a question about Word?”
Geek: “I use LaTeX.”
Non Geek: “Do you mean latex? What does that have to do with Word?”
Geek: “Please stop talking to me.”

Scenario Four

Non Geek: “What are you doing?”
Geek: Last time I talked to Bob he asked me some stupid question about Word again, and I keep telling him I don’t even use Word, he ought to know by now. He must be the densest idiot in this office. How can I avoid this again? I thought if I just sit real still and pretend I didn’t hear anything he would go away. Perhaps antisocial behavior will work. “Please stop talking to me.”
Non Geek: Laughs “You’re a real card you know. Crack me up everyday. So, I was wondering if I could ask you a question about Word?”
Geek: “I USE LaTeX!!!”
Non Geek: “Do you mean latex? What does that have to do with Word?”
Geek: “F??? OFF!!! I’m an engineer not IT. You want to know what to do with Word. You f???ing type! It is not rocket science! You just f???ing type in Word! That is all you do!”

Scenario Five

Non Geek: “What are you doing?”
Geek: Screams “I USE LaTeX!!! RTFM MOTHERF???ER!!!” and begins beating Bob in the head with the 25 pound lead-acid battery scavenged from his uninterruptible power supply.

Conclusion

So if you are not a geek I would recommend you stop asking us what we are doing. Unless you really want to know and can appreciate that we don’t care about Word or what ever other application you are having a hard time figuring out. Those questions should likely be addressed to IT and then only after you’ve tried to figure out the problem for yourself. Remember non-geek. Software engineer does not answer questions about applications, software engineer writes the applications. Unless you are talking to the software engineer that wrote Word, they probably don’t know that much about it because there are better tools that are not as user friendly.