Personal essays
On kindness and not
Open
There is a scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s “God Bless you Mr. Rosewater” where Eliot is preparing to baptize two babies.
He’s not very religious and has warned the mother that “nothing I did would count in Heaven, but she insisted just the same.”
I don’t know why this story has popped into my head. I sat down to write about something quite different and have now made a note to myself to get back to it next week.
In the past few weeks I’ve been to two conferences for iOS programmers. The first was in Chicago and the second in Skopje.
The settings couldn’t have been more different - and yet, there was something they had in common.
The people were just so nice.
One of the speakers at the second conference asked me to introduce him to the audience by reminding everyone of the Pac Man rule.
During breaks, people stand around in circles and talk to each other. This is great. You walk around feeling the energy from their discussions.
But the circles look closed. Of course they will welcome you in if you push forward, but what if the circles included a space for you to naturally occupy?
That’s the Pac Man rule. Always open up your circle like the mouth of the Pac Man character so someone else feels welcome to join.
Once they’ve joined, open up your circle again so that someone else can.
Judgement
Eliot is asked what he will say and do at the baptism.
He thinks a minute and says he’ll sprinkle some water on the babies and then he’ll say “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded.”
Too crowded, in my opinion, to be jerks to each other.
So, it may have been the high I felt coming back from a second conference filled with so many nice people interacting so wonderfully, but Sunday I made a mistake and fought with the Internet.
“Oh Daniel,” you say, “you know better. This never ends well.”
I suppose.
Somebody posted about a certain piece of software from Apple that doesn’t meet their needs.
Sometimes a thing is just not for me and sometimes it’s not good. I mostly know the difference.
So I agree that this thing they were complaining about was a valid complaint. This particular thing should have been better.
I have no idea why it wasn’t better and neither does anyone posting.
I have a suspicion that it’s not better because a business decision was made not to allocate resources to address the issue. Maybe the decision is right and maybe it isn’t.
I use Apple’s presentation tool Keynote a lot and there are things that it doesn’t do that I wish it did. But for many years it was developed to support Steve Jobs style of giving a keynote and he never did the things on my wish list.
Actually, I don’t know if any of that is true but that’s the reason in my head.
And that’s why I decided, against my better judgement, to tap “Post.”
The key
The post that pushed me over the edge said that the only alternative to explaining why the software wasn’t good is that the members of the development team are “not sufficiently capable of making it better themselves, that they’re C-team programmers or something.”
I posted to object to attacking the developers as not sufficiently capable.
Someone else on the thread jumped in to say that I had misunderstood the original poster and that those of us replying were just trying to get attention by replying to a famous person.
Sigh.
We’re not in Skopje anymore.
Just to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood, the original poster returned to say “The team making
There are plenty of other explanations. Very good teams of very good programmers may know exactly what needs to be done and someone above them has decided there are other priorities.
There’s no need to make it mean and personal.
And so I threw out my plan for today’s essay as Eliot’s baptism thoughts popped into my head.
He finishes, “At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—”
“‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 270. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe