"interesting" that's due to myself quickly understanding your meaning, and I said it in fun, but I still had difficulty sleeping that night, really, I suck at anything but sincere friendship, to add, write a novel and I'll consume it in a day, no science fiction thanks
Big fucking wall of text. You've been warned. Don't read this if that type of stuff annoys you.
Speaking of communication difficulties, my face-to-face speech patterns are atrocious unless I have prepared.
I mean I have to give myself a pitch and I have to drive myself into concentration and focus and memorize what I'm going to say in each case of that discussion that I'm about to have.
This could be a presentation to an audience of 20 to 50 people or could be simply face-to-face.
My life was a series of rapid fire technical conversations for the most part when I wasn't coding. But that's cuz I already knew it. That's all I could speak about. It was all in my back pocket.
It wasn't until I was about 45 until I could hold a conversation. Something clicked then. But it's still not an easy flow.
On reread and typo fix. I'm going to give you another spin here. I just remembered what clicked. Holy shit. Hot chick.
So I just started a job. I escaped one major company and I landed nicely in another and the boss who brought me in brought me in sold me as this holy shit off the charts genius. I'm not. He was overselling. He was justifying my salary. He had to convince his boss I was worth it. And that meant everyone had some fucking expectations.
I try not to do that.
A week in, the whole group goes to the local bar. Big and noisy with lots of music and dancing, and I don't do bars. I don't dance in this context. I've never been in one for more than 10 seconds in my life beyond a very specific band that I went to bars to see in my youth. That's it. It's a waste of money. I can't handle the noise or the social awkwardness.
But I was forced to go. I was a new guy.
I'm there and this incredibly beautiful woman comes up and asks me to dance and takes me to the floor and starts dancing with me (slow and close) and says it's good you did all those drugs in your youth cuz now you've lost enough intelligence that you're capable of speaking to us.
What the fuck?
How many different ways can someone stroke my ego simultaneously?
She is the junior to the production manager and I report to her on specific projects and every Monday morning I come in to say this is what the state of the project is. We had a standard meeting.
She refused to talk about business. She told me that it's her job to socialize with me. Simple as that. She will do it. So we simply had conversations. Rambling enjoyable, wild or not. What happened over the weekend and what did that feel like?
And then after an hour of that she said okay. It's business time and we got shit done.
She fixed me. And I don't remember her name.
When I hit 60 it all became magical. At that point I'm a goddamn social butterfly. The old man hormones kicked in. But until that point….
I am incapable of holding conversation without annoying the fuck out of the person across from me unless they can understand and accept what is happening and give me a tiny bit more time.
Just a little bit. Maybe a second and a half in between each passage of our words going back and forth.
I need that much time to hear and understand and flip it all around and figure out what I'm going to say next before I can start to formulate the words that I am saying.
That's because I'm not preparing what I'm saying while I'm listening to you. I'm actually trying to listen to you. I am incapable of listening and trying to understand while simultaneously figuring out what I'm going to say to you next.
I need a tiny bit of time. It's a lag. It's a face-to-face lag with another person. If you're on the phone, you might think it's AI.
Most people think I'm hesitating and it gives them an opportunity to continue to speak.
After the 20 or 40 or 100th time of this happening in a 20-minute conversation I am to the point of shut the fuck up when I am trying to say something.
I will interrupt you every time you start to speak. When I pause. I will ask for a pause. You will look at me like what the fuck, you just interrupted me, and you told me what to do. Yes I did. My hand is up like a traffic cop at that moment. Shut the fuck up.
Keep in mind I started my professional life as a bastard operator from hell. You walk into my office. You fucking kneel. So I was trained pretty hard in the beginning to control the users. Velvet covered steel glove.
Hey Brian.
You were a tough brilliant bastard.
You are my first system administrator/ hey kid shut the fuck up and get out of here. Read the fucking manual. Don't waste my time. Kneel before me. You kicked my ass and you kicked it well. I learned at least a half a dozen variations of Unix under you. Thank you very much. Maybe you'll read this here someday.
I started with ed. Line editors. I thought in grep. We didn't have them fancy backscrolling screens. Cursor positioning? Hah. In some rooms it was fucking punch cards. No screen at all.
When I got to the point that I could write termcap entries by hand, I started feeling a little more comfortable. When I could tell which terminals had the standard glitch that wasn't documented, I knew where to change the adjustment. When I could could write all the entries to emulate whatever terminal showed up on my desk and write the matching term cap entry and then proved it worked full screen identically to the software and the hardware and now the software can replace the hardware and they can use a PC and throw out all those old fucking terminals, life is getting a bit better. Multiplied that by all the companies buying that software.
And then fucking terminfo showed up and I had to learn it all again.
How many competing email systems were there 30 years ago. There must have been dozens that we went through before we settled on three of them that we might use and then there's new ones continuously that got better. It was a constant churn.
How many industrial printer device drivers talking to which CPU architecture and which seriall chip or parallel chip did I have to figure out the ioctl calls for? That's assembly and binary masks. That's bit twiddling. That's doing a lot of ANDs and XORs.
Moving on.
My next boss from 35 years ago is reading this forum. I give him entertainment that you cannot possibly imagine.
I used to tell him to shut the fuck up. He played jazz. He had a jazz station going on in his office. I ran into his office 20 times a day during heavy development or production issue times.
Every time I told him to turn his radio off because I cannot think when there is jazz in the room.
I need 5 mg of methamphetamine under my tongue at 5:00 in the morning to get through a solid day of work in a distracting environment to about 3:00 in the afternoon and then I'm dragging and then a train ride home for an hour and then relax for a few hours and go to sleep and flip back and do it again.
I can't do meth anymore. High blood pressure.
I cannot think at all if I am in a room with multiple conversations going. I simply cannot do it. I go into observe and absorb mode. Just let it flow and get the context. Get the gestalt.
I hear all the conversations and my subconscious is storing a significant portion of them. I can't pick them out individually later, but I might get a phrase or a feeling associated with a person based on the experience.
I always have a pad ready to take notes. If I want to store a thought in this context it cannot be done verbally or electronically. I have to write it by hand on a piece of paper.
Cocktail party effect. I hear everything simultaneously. Zero filter.
Adhd distraction story time…
Try to imagine me trying to concentrate and program while sitting next to my boss on the $300,000 seat on the stock exchange floor. That's what he told me that seat cost. Here, sit here, learn. I want you right here in the middle of the frenzy. Excuse me?
Yes this is a very special seat. This is the seat next to me in the center of 50 people that I run. We're packed like fucking sardines in here and there's a thousand screaming traders who need us continuously.
But they don't need me. I'm here to code some back office of shit that's going to change your world.
Yes, but there's all kinds of other things you need to learn and I want you sitting next to me during this process.
Nah.
How about you give me one of those executive glass boxes up there?
And how about you give me another desk next door on the 42nd floor with a window. My Lord, the storm's rolling in were awesome.
Can I have that? I'll just pop in over and hang out whenever you need me. I'm always accessible but I get to concentrate. And I get a view from the glass box, God damn that was awesome.
Oh, you're sending me to the development group down on Wall Street and you just want me to make friends and learn for a few weeks? Get vendor presentations and have people kiss my ass? Oh you want me to do a little coding? A little stealthy research. Oh yeah no problem. I can do that.
Oh you like that program that's running on all the servers and all the fucking trading systems. And you know whether or not trading is capable of running when you get off the train and therefore the whole fucking world works when you walk through the door.
Before this moment you didn't know what hell you were walking into, now you know exactly what's going on in every one of those goddamn servers down to a red light or a green light.
Can trading commence?
Yeah I got that. I can code that. Give me 2 weeks.
It took them 3 months to turn on the security permissions to allow that code to run. It had to figure out everything everywhere. That's a lot of servers with a lot of permissions. And I was doing process table application checks and is this the right application on the right server? Talking to the right application on the other server. Now map it out too. The matrix of thousands of trading servers. Now map that out into a time zone with many of these centers.
I had to code my own multitasking distribution throttling system just to keep a scoreboard going for the thousands of applications running simultaneously while not impacting trading.
That took 3 hours. No problem.
Oh, you liked it, it worked, cool. What do you mean? I have to come into the office every NIGHT for the next two weeks to talk to some guy in Japan. Oh you want my code running in Japan. Okay. I have to guide him through the implementation cuz I don't get security on the Japanese systems. Got it.
That was a fucked up schedule.
Oh that works very nicely and now this is getting some attention and holy shit.
You're telling me you the guy who's in charge of this whole fucking world, and trust me this guy had power, said that two weeks of code that I wrote made his career and whatever next level meeting and discussions were I had is they're flying me to London next week and they just want me to have fun and turn the code on.
They've already given me the go have fun credit card.
That was the first time in my life. Go Have Fun.
Every coworker you meet, offer to take out. Offer to take them to an expensive restaurant or bar across the street. Go get some expensive booze and play pool and punch the stupid machine to see how strong you are.
My current boss of the time could do a roundhouse kick. Unassuming little Asian dude and I am not big and this guy could take your fucking head off with a roundhouse kick. And anybody's head another foot taller. He broke that machine. He could be reading this. I'm not saying his name.
This is Manhattan. If you meet an associate that has traveled from any other location to Manhattan to learn or to go to a meeting and they are someone of any value to you, your career, or just your social circle within the company, use the credit card to take them out and have fun.
The above roundhouse kicker gave me that card.
Oh, he created that job for me. 10 years before that he was a sysadmin running my Unix systems along with another few admins. I teamed them up so brilliant individuals could tag team.
He learned for a couple years, went back to get his MBA, rocketed through the ranks of Merrill Lynch, and took over the world. Then he created a job for me. That's how it works.
Back to credit cards.
In most cases when I did this, the person would turn around and say no problem. I'll put it on my credit card. Let's go. Have fun.
House fire. Growing mushroom arrest. jail. Pumping gas.
Just a little distracting.
Okay, I'm giving you a hell of a circle around of my life there. So my general attitude to anybody I'm speaking to face-to-face is:
If I am of enough value to continue the conversation for you, you must accommodate an extra second between the passing of the words between the people. There must be a lag, a hesitation, to allow me to respond.
Other than that, I can't.
The flip side of that is I can baffle them with brilliance. And when the brilliance runs out rather quickly I can baffle them with bullshit.
Not on purpose. It's just I've rehearsed so many different conversations and answers to questions before that moment and ran through so many goddamn different patterns of what WOULD I say here, it gets to the point where I've got paragraphs.
My vocabulary for those types of conversations are paragraphs. They're three or four paragraphs long. That'll string together a point and I will rapid fire them. I will slam that down into that person.
If I'm doing this in a professional presentation they love it. Holy shit. This guy knows everything. That's part of my professional dance monkey dance history.
If I'm doing it one-on-one, it's kind of like you've just been attacked by a machine gun and I have to stand back and say I'm sorry.
So don't worry about any of the communication difficulties in this type of context. You get all the time you want. You can always step back and think about stuff. You can formulate. You can come back when you're comfortable.
Take care
