Do Not Want

On the day after Thanksgiving, Becky has this Fourth Friday Challenge for me:

“Anti-Gratitude List, or ‘I cursed the day these things were born/created/developed.’ At least five, please.”

This one is surprisingly hard for me. I don’t follow the code of the hater. In high school, I noticed how much time and energy some people wasted on hating other people or things that they couldn’t change. Doing that wasn’t a personality trait that I had, and I decided that I would stomp it out whenever I noticed it rearing its ugly head. So I’m going to have to go into a brainstorming rant to come up with this list. Let’s start the clock.

• Willful ignorance / limited rationality / a lack of desire to discover someone else’s perspective.
• Not running the damn tests.
• Not reverting out changes that break the build.
• Committing new code to the repository when the build is already broken.
• People who don’t understand how a four-way stop works.
• Things that sound all-natural but whose ingredient lists make it clear they’re not.
• The belief that businesses exist solely to maximize profits.
• That bananas go from being tasty to being not-so-tasty but still edible in such a short period of time.
• The myth of effective multitasking.

That’s what came out in the first five minutes. There was more there than I thought, and there’s probably still more yet if I want to keep digging. I realize now that because this sort of thing is not normal for me is exactly why Becky asked me about it. Well played, Becky. Well played.

Comments

[Becky]

That's RIGHT, baby! Check and mate.

[Kurt Whitner]

Having that Anti-Gratitute List is so awkward. Well, I guess that's truly a unique way to celebrate Thanksgiving.