If any of you know Razor Ramon, you must know “Smokers are losers” was his punch line. But this post is not about Razor Ramon or his punch line. Read away!
I think you already got the point. And there are thousands of them all around. They will be sitting there minding their own business and when someone proposes to do something, these people just burst up with full of energy from God knows where and starts to put forth these “brainstorm” ideas! Some even go to the extent of inviting Obama for inaugurating an half an hour seminar of one of the students!
The usual questions and remarks are
“Why do we have to do it like that?”
“Let’s do this”
“Let’s do that”
“That hasn’t got the punch” (Soon they’ll be getting a punch!)
“Just that? Nothing else?”
“That won’t work man”
“Why plan something that is going to be a flop?”
“Nobody is going to notice it”
“Let’s take that program and route it via this one and set up a multi dimensional hologram so that the aliens passing by might see it and attend” (For goodness sake!)
You must hear them mouthing off all these “brilliant” ideas. And when you tell them, “Hey, let’s stick to the things we can do” they get all touchy and emotional as if their “stupendous” opinions weren’t valued! Oh my God… It would be nice if you could tell them “STFU”. But why make enemies? So we put that in mind.
And not only that, these guys are worse than lawyers! They spot all the tiny weeny things that weren’t upto their expectations and go on griping about them. But hey, let’s look at the bright side. Its one thing all of us programmers find really useful. Debugging! Okay, let me dub them “The Debuggers”! Less offensive too right?
Now there is one category of people who is just full of team and group spirit when talking to but when you ask them for support and participation for a venture that you’ve taken a bit trouble to organize, they come up with this bull-shit excuses of having “Exams” or a certain ‘sudden’ mood to study the second paragraph of some third chapter.
Getting things done is the beauty. Not organizing a group together so that you can sit and gossip about the things happening around you. Instead of sitting and saying, “I hate everyone and everything around me”, try to give it a shot so as to make things right. You don’t have to go to any extent of making everything right. Just start off one small piece with a few friends of yours. And just like an open source project, talk to people to pick up on the idea. Not everyone will co-operate, but some people are there who can be convinced. Some souls who just needs the tiniest bit of motivation or push. But unfortunately, since gossiping is way much easier and does not need any strain, they join that club pretty easily.
The first sentence of the last paragraph was the advice Shalin Jain gave me when I tried to “talk” to him about these “great” ideas that I had. And that was the best advice one could give I guess.
I may not truly and wholly be right in what all I’ve just said. I’m a human too. But I believe I have the right to say what I’ve said.
A 'psycho' path. 