I wish I could share Gareth's appreciation for the opportunity to work with me. But the fact is that on the whole, I find Gareth (or "the idiot" as I tend to think of him) very difficult to work with. Apart from just being generally cranky, cantankerous and egotistical, he seems to want to be in control all the time and not very interested in what I can contribute. I sometimes wonder why I'm here at all.
Leaving aside his continual desire to "drive" and control the keyboard (I prefer to think of myself as the more cerebral, anyway), he seems to blame me for everything that goes wrong - even though most of the time it's his fault - and then, whenever we do finally manage to get something working, he takes all the credit - because he was the one doing the typing! As if he's had a single original thought in his life!
More than anything, it's his interaction style that I find difficult to deal with. As I said, I am more a thinker, an observer of reality. He's always chomping at the bit to do something without really stopping to consider if it is a good thing. And then when I try to interrupt his flow, he doesn't even want to listen to me.
Often, I'll find myself contemplating some aspect of the code which seems perplexing or hacked together when suddenly, without warning, he will change the window and flit off onto some completely different task. Then, just when I'm about to point out some obvious flaw, he'll start the debugger and tell me that he's "busy". Eventually, of course, he comes back to the same point I'd originally wanted to let him know about. If only he slowed down for a moment to talk to me.
And then there's his language and communication style. Leaving aside the continual shouting and swearing (well, when you make that many mistakes can you blame him?), whenever he does talk to me it tends to be in a challenging and angry way. Why can't he recognize that I have something to contribute? And even when he is in a good mood - finally having figured out some trivial bug - he says "high five, Nelson", even though he knows I have flippers. Talk about species-ist.
And, finally, since I'm here, I'd like to point out how much nagging and gnashing of teeth it has taken in order to get him to just let me write this little piece on his blog. You'd think I wanted to do a hit job on him or something.
About Nelson
Our guest blogger today was Nelson, a plush shark from Ikea, who sits next to me on a daily basis as my pair partner when I am working from home. He appears to have deep insights into my psyche as a pair partner, not to mention being able to provide truly honest feedback.
No comments:
Post a Comment