andrewducker | Interesting Links for 06-09-2023

#4 reminds me of an extremely annoying opinion piece I read a couple of decades ago about geeks looking for partners.

Its premise was: if you come home from work, or out of your study, saying "Honey, I just did the most amazing hack!", would you prefer (a) a partner who says "that's nice dear" and puts your dinner down in front of you, or (b) a partner who says "Ooh, what was it? Wait, how did that even work? Show me in more detail ... " and two hours later you're still both enthusing over it and have sent out for pizza. Its conclusion was: you should prefer (a).

This annoyed me because it seemed self-evidently bollocks. It annoyed me because, unlike my phrasing here, it was conventionally gender-stereotyped rather than gender-independent. And it annoyed me most of all by neglecting all the other possibilities! For example, surely another quite plausible option is a partner who is also obsessively geeky but about something else, so that you don't exactly share each other's specific enthusiasm, but are sympathetic toward the general behaviour patterns of geekhood, because you have them too. Plus each of you has something to do when the other one is off doing their thing.

This article at least sounds as if it would have disagreed with that one, which is a start :-)

Yes. I don't need my partner to be exactly the same as me, but I do want to be able to talk to them.

And also, Jane and I finish work around the same time. The idea that she'll be putting the dinner down in front of me as I walk through the door is laughably old-fashioned.

Well, that article was a couple of decades ago. But I think even then it was a couple of decades out of date!

I definitely want somewhere between b) and your option of c) other geekdom.

I prefer developer geeks in a different language or stack, or who nerd on a different aspect of sailing or self-sufficiency or music or whatever.

I have never understood partnerships where the partners are if the "yes dear, here's your dinner" ilk.

Though...a THIRD partner who did all that would be USEFUL, I have no idea WHY they'd hook up to be "mum" to a pair of geeks...

Jane and I have regularly said that we'd find a wife very useful around the house.

(As it is, we have a cleaner one morning a week.)

That would be the highly-paid professional cook/housekeeper...

Well yes, money is a reason :-) But I don't have enough

But I'm from a family background/social class where we would be far more likely to BE the "servants" than to employ them.

So no handyman or gardener for me either.

We have a team of gardeners. They come round for about half an hour every three weeks, and charge me about £35 for blitzing the garden back into shape.

They are woefully underpaid! There is no way the ones here would charge so little. How can they live? How can they even afford tools?

And I guess you did know people who had gardeners, cleaners etc. when you were a child? I never did. I know people who *were* those things. It seems a stubbornly hard mentality to shift for me. Sigh.

I don't think we knew people who had gardeners when I was a kid. Or at any point up to about three years ago, when we got one.

I assume they afford to live because they go round a whole bunch of places and spend almost no time at each one.

Half an hour of hour many people's time? They need tools, fuel, a vehicle (or transport fares) just to operate. They spend time traveling. Maintaining tools. I'm almost certain the economics cannot work out unless (and maybe even if) they live in overcrowded squalor far from town.

:-) still more than me :-)

Stay-at-home mothers do it all the time.

I'm sure they do (as well as many many other tasks!)

Sadly, there's just me to do everything, including a full time job (which is at least from home).

My wee cat does pest control, at least he pulls his (4kg) weight :-)

(It wasn't the plan, but my housemate's job, that took him 2 years to find, is site work, so he is now never here)

Option A reminds me of the story in Obama's memoirs about what happened after they called him at 6 AM to tell him he'd won the Nobel Peace Prize, and I quote:

After I hung up, Michelle asked what the call was about.
"I'm getting the Nobel Peace Prize."
"That's wonderful, honey," she said, then rolled over to get a little more shut-eye.

I wonder if that's "not interested in Nobel prizes" or "My husband is already the most powerful person on the planet, I'm now jaded about people handing him more", or just the very low level of sleep that seems usual for people operating at that level.

I'm sure it was just "I'm too tired to deal with this right now," which is also pretty much how the president was on the phone with his aide who gave him the news, but regardless of its reason I thought the dismissive tone in the story was very funny.

I completely agree. Deserves to be immortalised in fiction of some kind.

Interesting Links for 06-09-2023

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