Or maybe it was 1975. Or 1996.
I spent spent far more time that I would have chosen yesterday being argued at by a guy who insisted that events that I had witnessed and been involved with that very morning, and the mechanism of which had been confirmed by the electrician who helped wire it up, could not possibly have occurred.
In support of this, vague memories of past performance of the device -- I have those, too, and of management deciding it needed to work differently, in the exact manner I had observed only hours before -- to which he added a detailed description of an earlier generation of equipment, gone more than twenty years.
There's a point where you just give up. Sure, the entire staff and I hallucinated it. That must have been what happened.
People are funny. I remember as a boy, the service person taking in Dad's '66 VW Beetle for a repair. When Dad picked it up, the same person insisted there was no way the car was driven in under its own power - there were three problems with it that precluded it. Dad just grinned and said God must have had a hand in it getting there then.
ReplyDeleteNo arguments - just bemusement. He later told me that some people just aren't worth thinking about too hard - they have problems they need to unload. Just leave their crap by the side of the road - just not worth bothering with.
Agree with Anonymous. There are some people in my life where I've just cultivated the habit of nodding and making neutral mouth-sounds when they go off, because nothing I'm gonna say will change their mind. Better for my blood pressure and everything.
ReplyDeleteTo quote Adam Savage... "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
ReplyDeleteI think for some people thats an all day every day habit they get into and never get out of... because "Thinking is hard."
I think that I am a really easy going person, and then I come across a person like this, who tries to tell me I am wrong, when it is quite apparent that I can't be wrong, the truth is staring them right in the face. And even while I try my best, I find myself, depending on my mood, as I get older, becoming less tolerant of idiots. I want to blame it on the age thing, but I know it is just my fault, and no one else can blamed. But I am ok with that too.
ReplyDeleteWhat I love is when you are trying to explain to someone how something works. (Could be anything) and they are convinced that "it can't work like that."
ReplyDeleteAt which point, you can either double down, or walk away. (I want to say you could punch them, and that is often what I want to do, but apparently it is frowned on to actually do it.)
Try explaining quantum mechanics, or the fact that bananas are radioactive. Actually people can be willing to learn about quantum physics, but will deny that food has always been radioactive.
I am recently recovered (in the alt.sysadmin.recovery sense) from my job of 25 years. The boss got to the point where he knows how everything works, because of his experience of things back when CPUs had 40 pins at 0.1".
ReplyDeleteSo when he had some, let's say "interesting", problems with WhatsApp, I said "that's because..." "No, WhatsApp doesn't work like that, it works like this..." OK, whatever.
Because you get dirty and the pig likes it.