Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Eh, I'll blog

Either Kramer is really bored at law school, or he's really upset that I found a non-equivocation hole in his utilitarian analogy from Saturday night. So it goes; my boss is out all week so this seems like a better diversion than designing e-mail marketing campaigns. (PS I don't do graphics.)

Watch me work in real time!

Old people bother me.

Not the elderly, mind you (although I'd appreciate it if the '91 Honda Accord doing a steady 48 on the Long Island Expressway would stay out of the centre lane); rather, "old" people in the generational and colloquial sense. You know, the people who "can't" program a VCR clock, to use a dated example.

I'll give you a real-life example. I have a co-worker who's twice my age that has a desk across from mine. Let's call him "Joe," since that's his name. He's our company's web designer, and theoretically responsible for implementing the presentation of changes I make to our web presence. And when I first started here, he'd been here for nine months in this role and did not know what HTML was. You know, the base markup language that every single webpage ever made uses. I had to teach him. Okay, it might not be common lay knowledge, but when your sole job requirement is updating a website a couple times a month, you might make it a priority to learn; trust me, if I can teach it to him, it's not that hard.

Anyhow we ended up with this new project -- designing a web application to print shipping labels -- that uses this label printing/generation software my boss purchased for us. Said software has absolutely zero documentation on how to do anything, or even what it does. I hacked my way through it and developed what we needed to get done over the course of the last month or so. Since you can tell I've all the artistic ability of a poo-flinging monkey, we needed Joe to design a user interface for this application. This requires a minimal level of interaction with the label software of doom. I installed this on his computer yesterday, and told him he needed to make things pretty.

J: "How does it work?"
K: "Well, your part is just drag and drop, move things around, draw pictures. Just play around with it?"
J: "What do you mean?"
K: "Play around with it, you'll figure it out."
J: "How do I do that?"

This is what drives me up the wall. The difference between old and young isn't age-related, but a direct correllation between being curious and incurious. I'm no young Wittgenstein but I reason that given enough time and resources, I can learn to do almost anything through "What does this button do?"-style familiarization. I think there's a lot of people in our generation who feel the same way. Yet with Joe's case it's a problem of not having direct instructions to follow. I and young people learn through experience. Joe and old peopple learn through repetition. Young people strive for a holistic sense of knowledge that allows us to make informed decisions about instances that we didn't foresee. Old people look at an unforseen situation and develop a shell of angry obstinancy.

Can Joe learn to do things as well as I can? Sure. He's (despite my burying myself behind example... I always organized my arguments poorly) a smart guy. But I think it's a level of unwillingness to learn further, as if reaching a personal watershed, as new information and technology can't dislodge or impact upon previously reached conclusions about how things "should" be. Which we (young people) all know to be false, and which is why John McCain still has a concievable chance to elected President by a mass of old people who are scared of change.

And yes, of course, my biggest fear is turning into Joe.

1 comment:

JSK said...

While it's true that you may have escaped the fallacy of equivocation, your response to the Trolley problem lead to the absurd conclusion that killing can be morally justified by the victim's intent or state of mind. Way to be, Kevorkian.