Divide Until Trivial

A friend sent this to a few people by email:

”Two men look at each other and start to argue. They make a phone call. One man leaves for home and the other begins to dig in a different place.”

(click here for a solution – it’s rather under-whelming!)

In such situations, the quintessential Geek looks at the request, and determines that it is either:

• hard in ways he is not proficient (eg. is emotionally based, rather than logical)
• has an imprecise answer
• requires subject matter that is unfamiliar and deemed to be of low quality (such as popular culture, celebrity gossip, etc.)

…upon this determination, the Geek simply dismisses the request as “pointless”, or “beneath him” or abhorrent in some other way. If pressed for an answer, the Geek will attempt to change the rules of engagement in some way, so as to make the problem more suitable for him. If even this is impossible, the Geek will most likely offer a series of different answers, each innovative and defensible, but often opposed to each other, as a demonstration of the perceived poor quality of the request.

On receipt of this sort of behaviour, the person making the request will probably feel like they’ve been “told off”, and won’t feel like they should ever come back and ask anything else ever again. Worse than that, they won’t have got the answer they were looking for.

I’ve seen this sort of thing myself. I’ve asked technical specialists things that I think are perfectly reasonable requests, only to be rewarded with a barrage of snide “put me downs”. I’ve often felt rather aggrieved by this, but then went back and asked again, rephrasing my request and perhaps taking out some aspects of it that weren’t really that important. I’ve then been given a well researched, articulate and precise answer with all the detail I could want. I’ve been left to assemble this information and some of the things I already know myself, but ultimately have a far better result than expected.

I’ve seen others struggle with this too. At the end of the day, it all comes down to making your request easy to fulfil. Sometimes when talking to technical people this requires skills we’re not used to using, but if we make the effort, we find that actually those people we thought were “hard to reach” are actually some of our best assets.