Seeing as I love food as much as I do, I opted to pile my plate with sandwiches and listen to a pair of twins make fun of me riding to dwarf weddings on unicorns in WoW (one of them noticed I was playing Secret of the Magic Crystals on Steam, and I think it melted his brain a little - they're both hardcore FPS gamers). The truth of the matter is, I have no interest in sucking up to people that I don't like. If I suck up to them, then someday I might end up working for them, and I will just get more and more angry at them to the point where I end up punching a hole in their desk out of frustration, and then I'll probably get fired. It doesn't make sense to put myself in that situation in the first place - would it be better to just be in some lowly position than be unemployed?
I don't think any of this is the fault of the company I work for - in fact, almost all of my team is really friendly towards me, and I'm starting to feel more a part of the group now that I've gone to a few of their social events. I think it's just more the fact that the role I'm in isn't really suited to me so I'm often left wondering why they hired me in the first place. The #se440 people say that it must be a bad place to work if Leigh is working there and I can't help but feel that maybe I am the less alcoholic version of Leigh (but not as good at Starcraft 2). In most cases, I wouldn't describe myself as organised or responsible, and it seems that that is also the general feeling of my friends. I am far better at making friends than I am at doing anything useful like programming or management.
In high school, in came up with a hypothetical that I often end up asking myself. Imagine that a new compound is discovered. Upon a preliminary analysis, scientists end up concluding that the element has the properties of the universal panacea. There is much rejoicing. However, before they are ready to announce their discovery to the world, another study finds two new things: there is only a limited supply of this element in the world, and once it is used, it is broken down into components that can never be reassembled. Given another 300 years of analysis, they may be able to replicate the component and mass produce it (how they know it is 300 years is irrelevant). The more of it they use up, the longer it will take before they can mass produce it, as they will have less to perform tests on.
So now imagine that for some reason, you are on the threshold of death. What is so important about you that these scientists should use up some of this compound in order to prolong your life?
I have never been able to answer that question to my satisfaction - the only answer I could come up with was that there is a small, small chance that I might discover or create something that would improve the world in some significant way, but to be honest, that is so unlikely that if I ever were in that situation, I wouldn't even bother contacting them. "Hi guys, I can make basic spreadsheets and fold Post-It notes into paper cranes - please delay the improvement of mankind and save me."
Why do we go to such lengths to save sick people? When I asked Stanley for some cake recipes that are allergy friendly, he said to me that it's the survival of the fittest. If we keep sick people around, aren't we just further polluting our gene pool? In the rest of the animal kingdom, the elderly and the sick are usually the first to fall prey to predators. Then again, we have managed to spread to many different areas of the world despite everything, so we must be doing something right.
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