What's it all about, Alfie?

The World Trade Center was hit. The Pentagon was hit. As a nation, there is excessive pain, cost, and grief. Things aren't going to be better in the next couple of days, weeks, or even months. Yet there's every reason not to be fatalistic about these events. That is, I suppose, only a single point of view.

I work in the financial industry, and there are a lot of people that are really wrapped up in the theory of the market. To them, this is all a reason to sell... into an economic depression. But they are depressed about this. I find that more than a little funny.

A Trader sees what he thinks he must do and then is depressed about it. He doesn't even see that he has options - choices that are open to him. And that those choices would allow him to feel better about himself, and the work that he does. All he sees is that the theory - which he places so much faith in, tells him how to act. I feel really sorry for folks that don't realize that they are prisoners of their own choices. We are all free creatures... free to do what we want, when we want, accepting the consequences of those actions - good or bad.

Maybe the depression is focused at the faith in the market theory... if they didn't place as much faith in the theory, then they wouldn't be forced to do what they thought they were being told to do. It's interesting that people who may not think of themselves as faith-based tie themselves to their beliefs as much as fanatical religious types.

People are funny...

I have worked with all kids of people... I've even been all kinds of people over my 39 yrs. of life, so I think I'm pretty well exposed to my middle-class group of humanoids. Yet once and a while you meet someone that represents such a skew in your data, that you have to stop and study this person more.

I have worked with a person we'll call Steve (that's not his real name) for about two months now. He has shown himself to be a pretty reasonable developer. He seems to know the code he's delivering, and while his vision very rarely extends outside the box, he seems to be adequate for the job. Then came today.

Today, Steve came to my office to see that his code was running terribly slow. First off, he didn't believe me that it was, and in the all-too-often stance taken by some developers "it works fine for me", he had to see it. So I showed him. As it turned out, they weren't using very similar data for their tests, so that there was every reason why the results would be significantly different. That wasn't enough, oh no...

Steve then proceeded to sit in my office for the next several hours learning absolutely nothing because the tools he was using weren't going to tell him what his problem was. I tried to, but had he listened to me, he wouldn't have been here in the first place, so it wasn't likely that he was going to take my advice at this juncture.

Oh... and did I say that Steve has a serious personal grooming problem? Yup... probably hasn't brushed his teeth in... Oh... let's call it six months and be safely conservative.

So I'm trying to work with a guy that doesn't really listen to me - though I've been right every time, doesn't realize when he's got to go back and fix something, and carries with him an odor that almost makes my eyes water.

So today hasn't been a great day of personal highlights...

What I want out of this is at least a glimmer of a sense that he takes back the realization that there is a problem... that it's not us... and that they have the wrong data model. With that, and enough time, I'm guessing that they will figure it out. But that's my hopes... life rarely lives up to our hopes for it.