Anti-Social Network

Sometimes at work I have compassion for E.T. and understand how he felt when he was left behind by his friends on this strange planet.

Yes I do realise how Queeny Dramatical the above comment is but let me describe this strange world where I spend most of my days.

I sit in a room with 4 C++ developpers. Now whoever has ever spent more than a few hours with pure C++ developpers can imagine what it’s like to be sitting there in the middle of 4 C++ programmers!!.

First they don’t talk.

When they do, they usually shout some life threatening menace to their defenseless screens while pointing their fist at them saying: “You F**** son of a mother b***, I’m going to kill you”. Or something like that. You get the picture.

Sometimes, instead of shouting, they just jump around in pure orgasmatic pleasure raising their hands to the sky in a position that screams “I’m God, I’m the best”. (which can’t be since that’s me they are talking about ;-))

Second, if you have the courage to speak to them you can’t just say: “Hey, can you tell me ….”.

No. You silly naive person! First you have to request the communication by waving at them with your both arms stretched so they pay attention to you and remove their headphones which isolate them from people like me: “Non-C++ developpers who want to talk“.
In fact, the best way to communicate with them is to send them an Instant Message even if they are sitting next to you. “Oh Oh, my computer wants to speak to me”. That for sure gets their attention and they reply straight away. Oh Yes! And they don’t even need to remove their headphones.

Then sometimes, when all is quiet and you can only hear the soft sounds of fingers nervously hitting the keyboards, a miracle happens… They all remove their headphones at the same time and start talking to each others!

Of course because they are all Czech, they speak in Czech and it goes something like: “dobry blatichova darek. Tak yo. Nemuzu tento tade pocitace. Ano. Dobry. Ah Ah Ah Ah” Or something like that. You get the picture.

Sometimes I can even hear “Cedricka” or “Cedricku” or “Cedrickem” (yes the Czech language is a killer) which means they are talking about me. So I just smile, putting a brave face trying not too feel neither lonely nor stupid (I know it’s hard). I’m the boss after all.

As I said, sometimes I feel like Cedric phone home!

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8 Comments »

1. You should try the experience with Java developers. Matt, please don’t comment!

   Comment by Mauro — 3/9/2006 @ 7:01 pm

2. I know how all you feel…

   Comment by bridget — 3/10/2006 @ 12:13 am

3. don’t people feel like there left out!!!! and want to be like the ohter person..well thats how I feel!!!!!

   Comment by bridget — 3/10/2006 @ 12:15 am

4. ehehe. that was funny..

   Comment by nec — 3/11/2006 @ 5:54 am

5. It all makes sense once your compiler comes back with an error for the first time

   Comment by Mike — 3/11/2006 @ 11:42 pm

6. LOL, that’s so true

   Comment by Stef — 3/12/2006 @ 12:22 pm

7. This is horrible 8-D

   Comment by Mattia Belletti — 3/12/2006 @ 2:24 pm

8. Your experience differs from mine a lot!! I got a friend who studies programming (mostly C++ I suppose) in a university, and he’s an unstoppable chatter. If you ever consider asking him a computer related question… don’t. One night we were coming back from a bar with few friends and I happened to mention “GPS”… and what do you know. Three hours later we find ourselves from the exact same location, lying on the snow (I’m from Finland) listening to that friend (which btw we have named Data) about his task in the army to calculate a direction and distance for grenade thrower from the stars. God knows how many subjects we had been listening to before that.

   Comment by ZupaDupa — 3/15/2006 @ 3:48 pm

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