SwimFinsSF

Compartmentalizing

Driving in to work today I passed one of those cars with a big Bush / Cheney banner in the window and I rolled my eyes and caught up to see who was driving. I guess I expected to see a grey haired old man with an angry look on his face, a redneck with a gun rack in the back window, or a sunday school teacher with a jesus-fish hanging from the mirror. This got me thinking… Is it fair / appropriate to assume that anyone that voted for that jackass (and yes - I think Bush is a jackass) is a right wing, christian, war mongering, rich, homophobic, yadda yadda yadda? Or should I be looking deeper…

Then that got me thinking about the other places in my life where I compartmentalizing people based on past experiences or other reasons rather than listening to the content of what people say and what they believe.. I think we all do it and I think it holds us back from seeing different perspectives and perhaps learning… He’s a war monger (just because he can see justification for war), She’s a racist (just because she has drawn conclusions based on race), He’s homophobic (just because he doesn’t believe the church should marry gays), He’s not super sharp (just because he doesn’t understand a piece of technology), yadda yadda yadda.

For example, there is a person that I’ve worked with over the the years and have let myself come to the conclusion that, while a good engineer by and large, this person is very inclined to jump to the conclusion that the problem they are looking at is caused by a catastrophic failure in the application rather than digging deeper to find that there may just be one small failure in an obscure place. As a result I’ve found myself avoiding dealing with this person because I don’t want to deal with this ‘the sky is falling’ attitude..

However the other day while working with this person I found that much of this has to do with the way they learn a subsystem and this learning process lead to a couple of important things. First, it led them to a more complete understanding of how the app functions rather than a ‘well it just works so we don’t want to touch it’ attitude. It also lead to them finding an issue in the app we didn’t see which had a fairly simple solution.

In the process we both learned from the process. I learned ways to approach a problem which will lead to a deeper understanding of the application and solutions to problems we didn’t even know we had. They learned that the design as it stands supports fairly simple solutions to some tricky problems and, in the process, they gained a more thorough understanding of how the app worked.

So back to the bumper sticker… It occurs to me, that while I may believe that our President is a jackass and is doing a great deal of damage in the world, just because a person has a bumper sticker on their car supporting him doesn’t make them a jackass. It may be that we agree on many points from health care to gay rights to international policy but they may have some perspectives that have led them to believing that Bush could make a positive difference for the country.

I may still think they are a jackass but if I let my instincts stop me from listening and learning then I’m being a bit of a fool myself…

LORD… the weird things I think about while I’m driving.. Guess its the price of a 2 hour commute to work