The Twilight Report

Today at work, I went into a guys office with my partner to find some information out about one of the systems we work on. This guy wanted to teach us a lesson, I think the lesson was how damn smart he was. I immediately realized this guy was completely full of shit. The examples he used to prove his point were flat out wrong. I look at my partner, as if to say "I don't believe him" ... but doing it subtle enough such that this guy doesn't notice.

Instead of getting into a heated argument about this I waited until we were done in the guys office and I talked to my partner privately and said that I didn't think what he was saying was right. We agreed that I would test my theory out and get back to my partner. It took me maybe five minutes to write the test case and run it. Sure enough, my understanding of the UNIX operating system was correct.

If this guy had been right, it would have been like someone had walked up to me and told me the sky was purple with pink polka dots and then I looked up to see the pink polka dots. I didn't want to get into an argument though, because when I get angry, I get incoherent, and when get incoherent I become much less convincing.

Instead I went over to my partner's office and showed him what I had done, and after a little convincing, he agreed with me. The thing is, instead of waving my hands I'd actually proved my point with actual code. It is hard to argue with that.

I didn't go back to the guy to tell him what I had found (that indeed the sky really was blue during the day and black at night). However, my partner talked about it with someone else who then told him. Later that day I'm walking through the halls of the soul-less corporation which pays for my photography habit, and he walks up to me and tells me that he was wrong. that a someone had done some research on the subject and found out that I was right. This made me feel good, even though I knew that he didn't even know that I had been right all along.

I allowed him to figure it out for himself, minimizing embarassment to him and did it in such a way that I did not make him my enemy.