People who will just never get what you're talking about. Never.

[Colophon]

@tdn

Just kidding. There were no brains.

[HeyHomie]

@Acsenray

Just reading these anecdotes is making me all tense and frustrated.

Leslie???

[sub]Leslie is Mrs. Homie’s name.[/sub]

[Acid_Lamp]

I’m guilty of one of these. I have zero ability to understand how computers work. I don’t get bits, bytes, packets, gates, passcodes, squls, addresses or anything else even remotely related. I KNOW i possess the intelligence required to understand but my brain shuts down as soon as someone tries to help me with this. As far as I’m concerned, magical internets goblins bring me my message boards, videos, and other media. I have an extremely low threshold for patience with malfunctioning equipment. When something breaks I either yell at Nashiitashii to fix it, or: Plan A: Try all the usual fixes I’ve memorized from the various companies and yell at them, B: Set fire to it and run.

[boozilu]

You know, when I first started working at a big company I thought the people in management must be really smart. Then one day I realized they had just been there longer.

Boy, that was liberating.

[LSLGuy]

One of my work worlds is a strange sort of Alice-in-the-looking-glass place where we have small teams drawn from two large groups of workers who then cooperate to make the product. But each group understands almost nothing about the other’s real duties or worldview. And the two groups have totally different psychological / emotional profiles. And one group is about 98% male and the other is about 80% female.

And we swap co-workers from the other group every week to make a new team.

So at the outset of each team engagement I have a canned conversation I go through to identify the ones I can communicate with vs. the ones like tdn’s project manager or the OP’s pal. My script is cleverly (I hope) designed to look to them like idle chit-chat, but it’s really an IQ/EQ/Cluefullness test. From this quiz I pick the one person I’ll deal with and let her be the spokesperson to the rest of their side of the team.

Sometimes the failure to get it, it burns.

[tdn]

@LSLGuy

My script is cleverly (I hope) designed to look to them like idle chit-chat, but it’s really an IQ/EQ/Cluefullness test.

Is there any way you can post it? Or give us the Rdr’s Dgst version?

[SandyHook]

@Nava

It doesn’t even have to be someone who’s dumb - it’s just that sometimes two people happen to be very firmly on the two sides of one of those Universal Divides (like drafters vs non-, pet-lovers vs non-, visual vs verbal…) and at most they can agree that “ok, this is something in which we don’t even disagree, we think in different frequencies”.

My cousin wasn’t particularly dumb, but he died without comprehending how can anybody want to have a 9-to-5 job. He knew he didn’t comprehend it. But to him, the idea that someone might want to have the kind of job whose mere thought made him want to run away, through the walls if need be, was just incomprehensible.

We explained that some people aren’t satisfied with such jobs or can withstand such jobs, some people actually enjoy making sure that the monthly balance is perfectly balanced and get enormously excited when they discover a new kind of financial product. Actually, my youngest brother (this cousin’s godson), who happens to be one of these people, was the one who explained it. Our cousin said something along the lines of “I believe you, I just don’t understand how can it be!”

If you ask me, a world where everybody wanted to spend the whole day climbing mountains would be as dull as one where we all wanted to spend it calculating compound interests, but hey - he just did not get it.

I think that’s me. I just can’t comprehend how people can take religion seriously. It’s so obviously drivil.

I can comprehend how they’d like it to be true. I wish it was.

I can see why they want it to be true.

I see the comfort of belonging to a large club of like thinkers.
But every time I talk to a believer (which I try to keep to a minimum as I find it painful) in the back of my mind I keep thinking, “You don’t really believe this, do you?”

[UncleRojelio]

I’m going to point my finger at myself. The thing I don’t get isHaskell. In college I took several classes from a particular professor who had a love for this language. He would always work Haskell into the course in some fashion. I was always able to follow along in the lectures, but when it came time to create something original with Haskell, I could do nothing but sit there and watch the cursor blink. In the intervening years since college I have installed a Haskell interpreter on every machine I have ever owned and have purchased just about every book on Haskell ever published. I’ve worked thorough most of these books. I’ve toyed with online tutorials. But still, ask me to write something in Haskell from scratch, I got nothing. Haskell is the bane of my existence.

[Chessic_Sense]

@LSLGuy

One of my work worlds is a strange sort of Alice-in-the-looking-glass place where we have small teams drawn from two large groups of workers who then cooperate to make the product. But each group understands almost nothing about the other’s real duties or worldview. And the two groups have totally different psychological / emotional profiles.

You work for Congress?