Hi!
Or lack of it....
At our dog show today, a lady asked if I would take a couple of head
shots of her Doberman for her.
Of course, I said yes.
She didn't want anything fancy, just something to show off the dogs
conformation, and she certainly wasn't looking for a "pro portrait"
I thought it might be nice if I could do something in controlled light,
so asked the show photographer if I could plug into her lights for a
moment to do the shoot.
In my day, this would be a no brainer. I'd be plugged in and shooting,
probably with the photographer helping out.
Nowadays, it seems, no one helps each other out. The little tweeb
looked at me like as if I had crawled out from under a rock and told me
no, if the lady wanted a portrait, she would do it and charge accordingly.
It would have cost her nothing to help, and she had nothing to gain by
refusing.
The world is changing, but I don't think for the better.
Wonder if you'd held large Nikon or Canon shotgun perhaps she'd be more
inclined to agree...
Hopefully one day I'll meet you in person, sir William, and then we
could talk on this...
Our company recently hired a fascinating individual. Nowadays he keeps
asking me great many questions. Few days ago I'm deep in my debugging
(pardon my professional terms) and so he comes. Asks his question. I
give him answer like this - "if you'd open file such and such, you'd
sure find it there"... And so he responds - "oh, yeppers, I'll go have a
look". Problem is - this is one of the most common files of the system
that I KNOW he opened quite many times already. So I give up on my
patience and invite him to the room gently asking him to kindly spend 5
minutes looking in the docs/common files, etc, before he commits asking
me (or anyone else) a question thereby distracting them... Modern lad
gives me a lecture about how smart he is and how the number of questions
decreased since he came on board. He finishes with "I work with maximal
efficiency, so when I need to know something - I ask a question"... I
look him straight into the eyes, sigh inside and kindly tell him that "I
don't mind him being the most advanced/efficient/and generally the most
important programmer of the company, but NOT ON EXPENSE OF ME OR ANYONE
ELSE for crying out loud"... He tells me that "he realizes it is nothing
personal, but he won't ask me a single question again"... Guess I
reached my goal, but he wouldn't see the point...
Eventually I debugged my program, but by mere 7 pm (in the evening),
after he was long gone...
There is a word in Hebrew that sounds exactly this - "interesant" - I
hope its meaning is self-evident. Our age is that of interesants,
nothing more, nothing less...
Sorry for the rant...
Boris
