Solidarity!

[elfs]

Anne C. is a blogger who writes about futurism and the promise of a medical or technological breakthrough that will lead to mental substrate independence in a blog entitled Existence is Wonderful. Normally, I read her for that, but she ocassionally gets personal and writes about her own issues with her aspyness.

In an article entitled Typical Special Needs, Anne points to an article in Time magazine about telecommuting. And one of the things she points out is that telecommuters complain about a lack of social interaction. The article goes on to talk about people who describe human contact as a need, and who go to great lengths to compensate for its lack or even simulate it when there's none about.

Nowhere does this article describe this need for interaction as a disability. Anne writes, "And yet, clearly it is a trait that must be accommodated if some people are to do their jobs properly and maintain their mental and emotional health."

Over the years I've tried to get up to speed on so-called "small talk." I still resent it, I do it badly, I initiate it at inappropriate times and have a difficult time choosing appropriate topics. I tend to model what I've seen other people do because their strategy seems to work for them.

I also understand the benefit of brainstorming. On Tuesday I closed myself in a room with the two other guys in the UI development team and we kicked around different ways of distinguishing between autonomic versus voluntary client-server interaction, so we could enhance security by timing out the session if the user had got up and left. Unfortunately for us, we'd been building the system out without regard for this, and going back, tracking down every interaction the user could have with the system, and distinguishing between those API calls (and there are a lot of them) that the client initiates because it wants to pull an update, and the user initiates because he wants an update, would have been a Herculean task. After kicking the idea around for fifteen minutes, I hit upon an idea to attach a monitor to the browser's keyboard and mouse handlers and sending a signal to the server every few minutes saying "The user is still here," and resetting the server-side timeout window.

The dynamism of interacting with them (and they're both very talented guys themselves, but my solution was an age & treachery sort of thing) helped speed the development, but then I had to go back and write the darn thing by myself. And I'm really not interested in what happened over their weekends. I doubt they're interested in mine.

As Anne says, people like me spend a lot of energy supporting the "special needs" of ordinary people, people who would never describe themselves as having "special needs," who believe themselves to be independent and self-providing, and yet these people balk at the idea that there are folks like me who would be perfectly happy to be left alone for several hours to produce.

Anne mentions that a "trivial" operation for most people (her example is "Call this person and ask them for that,") requires a great deal of effort and preparation. I sometimes rehearse what I'm going to say two or three times before calling a stranger or making a "routine" appointment.

My bugaboo is "writing specifications." These are documents that tell the user exactly what the product should and should not do. For me, there's one and only one language a specification should be written in: the code. Everything else is a cheap simulation. The fact that some people need to have it described to them in something other than Python, C, or ECMA feels like a disability to me.

Anyway, I just wanted to direct your attention to this article, because I think she's on to something here.

Comments

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

Specs only seem overrated until you've written one for a nontrivial system.