The Online Rant

I read the following quote today.

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."  - Samuel Johnson

Which made me think about my life. Do I treat people who can’t do anything for me the same way I treat people who can do something for me? Or how about those people I don’t really like? Do I treat them the way I should?

The truth is, I don’t. Especially people I don’t like. I’m not talking about people who have given me reason to be cautious about, or people who have mistreated me. I’m talking about the people who have never given me a reason to not like them, and yet I just don’t.

You know the type. The nerd at the party, or the odd person who is just a bit annoying. They are nice people, but not people I like. I have no reason to treat them badly,and yet I find myself avoiding them or ignoring them when they talk to me. It’s not right, and yet I end up doing it anyway.

It’s something I need to work on. Treating others the way I want to be treated is a biblical command. Not just a good idea. 

Matthew 7:12
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Thursday I had a rather interesting and odd event happen to me. Something that seems rather bizzare and that reminded me of the many strange and odd people that live in our country.
I had worked late Wednesday night, and hadn’t gotten to bed until about 2 am. So Thursday morning I was kind of sleeping in. I didn’t have to go to work, until 2 pm. So there was no reason not to catch up on the sleep I had missed the day before.

Around 9 am I woke up to hear someone knocking on the door of the house. Now, I was still pretty tired and I really didn’t want to wake up. So I waited to see if Stacey(my sister in law) would get up to answer it. But after the third knock, I realized that either Stacey wasn’t home, or she wasn’t going to wake up. So I got up, pulled on a pair of pants, and rushed down stairs to answer the door.
I’m sure I looked pretty wild. Barefoot, no shirt, my hair sticking up all over the place. I really wasn’t all that presentable. And the truth is I wasn’t very awake yet either.

So when I opened the door, I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw. There was the most backwoods, redneck looking lady I’ve ever seen standing at my door. She was wearing some type of flannel shirt and a pair of old jeans. But what really hit me, was that she was missing some teeth.

The first thing she did was hand me a paper that looked like it had been drawn with a crayon. Now remember, I’m not all that awake yet. So while I’m staring rather blankly at the paper, trying to decipher the crayon hieroglyphics she had drawn on it, she starts talking to me. (Click the thumb to see the paper she gave me)

It turns out, that she wants to know if she and her husband can have an old metal cage that had been left on the property by the previous owners of the property. I had been meaning to get rid of it ever since I moved in, but never got around to it.

So, still not all that awake, I told her to go ahead and take it. She gets this huge grin on her face(remember the missing teeth) and turns around to give her husband a thumbs up. Which caused me to look out at the street in front of my house. And there I saw the oldest most beat up truck I’ve seen in a long time. Her husband was just starting to get out of the truck. And believe me, he was just as redneck as she was. He started unloading sledge hammers to beat the cage apart with, and she ran down the stairs off my porch like she was afraid I might change my mind about letting them have the old cage.

They beat the cage apart, loaded it into the old truck and drove off. The strangest thing I ever saw.

I’ve been reading a programmers blog called Coding Horror recently. It can get pretty technical in some of it’s articles, so if you aren’t into programming I wouldn’t recommend it. If you are into programming, it really is a great blog and one you should start reading. Despite the programming focus, the latest article I think is one that applies to a lot of different industries. Not just IT based ones. So I thought I would post about it here.

The article is called, No Matter What They Tell You, It’s a People Problem. The gist of the article is that the main reason why software projects fail is a lack of a cohesive team. It’s not the only reason, but it is a big one. And it’s a reason that is hardly ever looked at or considered. No one wants to think that the reason their project isn’t going well, is because they don’t like or can’t get along with their coworkers.

Here is a quick excerpt from the article that I thought was really telling.

“Do you like the company of your teammates on a personal level? Do you respect your teammates professionally? If you were starting at another company, would you invite your coworkers along? Do you have spirited team discussions or knock-down, drag-out, last man standing filibuster team arguments? Are there any people on your team you’d ‘vote off the island’ if you could?”

So who would you vote off the team in your office?