i made a post a little while ago about funny characters from work. (you may remember – ‘crazy tech writer’ and ‘talks to himself’. so today there’s a couple others i’d like to talk about – ‘asian porn star’ and ‘arrogant new guy’ – these are 2 guys that work here. ‘asian porn star’ is a tall guy who has a mustache that is totally circa 1970’s pr0n work. every time i see him i crack up internally, thinking about the mustache. he’s a really cool guy, and very pleasant, and i just wonder if i’m the only one who thinks that. on to ‘arrogant new guy’ – this is an engineer who is one of the newer peeps here and he comes to me occasionally and asks condecending questions about code that he doesn’t really get. like ‘why do you do ‘a’ when you could be doing ‘b’ – it’s twice as fast, and much easier. then i get mad (hidden) and have to tell him ‘we tried b, but ran into problem x, and after talking about it, ‘a’ was the only way to get around it.’ he thinks about it for a while then comes back and says ‘i think i figured out a way to make ‘b’ work.’ and this leads me to 2 thoughts: 1) why weren’t you doing other work, since we all have tons of crap to do? and 2) why can’t you just take my word for it? i wrote the damn code and i’m pretty sure that i’m smarter than you. so usually i end up saying ‘well, if you want to try, go ahead, but make sure you test it really well, since it’s already working right. you need to test these 19 parts. go for it.’ then a couple days later i realize that he never checked in any changes.. guess his idea didn’t work out. i can remember when i started on as an engineer… i would find bugs in my code belonging to my peers and boss, but i’d make the changes and test them thorougly before going to them to tell them. that way at least i was right :). cheers all.

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