Nitnoid
“Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
I don’t remember who said that (… I’ll go check the Google Oracle … ah, the good Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! the full quote is from his book Strength to Love (1963):
“Who doubts that this toughness of mind is one of man’s greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
Smashing.)
I didn’t remember who said that, as I was saying, but the truth of that statement has never been more apparent than it has these last few days. Those millions of half-people, mentally lazy nitnoids settled into less-than-mediocre lives seem to congregate inside my sphere of influence, frustrating the ever-living shit out of my chances to progress.
On Saturday, I got into a heated online conversation with a guy about controlling on the VATSIM network. He vehemently insisted that I should no longer give a clearance by uttering the widely accepted shortcut phrase “cleared as filed” because it was “policy” and “how we’ve always done things here.”
That kind of molasses-slow reaction to stimulus is why there are no Woolly Mammoths roaming the Earth. First, on a practical level, “cleared as filed” is a completely legitimate IFR clearance. Second, there is no such policy (a trick I learned--and which I used on him--is to always ask for documentation: if what you’re asking “policy,” it’s written somewhere. If not, then it’s simply a figment of your limited imagination, asshole.) He couldn’t, of course, produce any documentation whatever.
In fact, upon a closer reading of the actual, written Standard Operating Procedure, we found it clearly stated that uttering the words “cleared as filed” is explicitly allowed. This guy wasn't only the Training Administrator charged with educating up and comers, but a solid gold member of the doomed Lemming Herd that questioned my reasoning when I asked them to review a certain Standard Terminal Arrival Route (STAR). The JAMMN arrival is clearly outlined as a procedure for flying into Salt Lake City airport when that airport is landing to the south.
But no, the thunderin' Lemming Herd insisted that because they’d always used that arrival for both north and south landings forever, they would continue using it that way, all practical evidence to the contrary. This gave rise to the slightly irritating practice of pulling the pilot off his established routing into Salt Lake when landing north to give them strange instructions about veering off course direct such-and-such and be at such-and-such an altitude by such-and-such distance, etc., etc. Thus, contravening the entire idea of STARs as a Standard Arrival Route.
Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
At work, there are several computer migrations taking place. There are a number of systems administrators partaking in the process, the epitome of painful thinkers. They loathe the process … when stretched to perform the mental equivalent of getting up out of a chair, they rebel. The whine. They squirm.
Above all, they don’t understand much, but they understand plenty about how they’ve always done things: give everyone in the office local computer administrative rights. In fact, blast local computer administrative rights, give ‘em Domain Admin rights. Put the Domain Users group in the Domain Admins group! Yeah, you’ll never have to fuck around with trying to figure out why things don’t work; with god-level rights, every single person in the domain will make things work, by Jove!
They don’t understand the basics, either. They don’t understand networking, how packets are built and transmitted. They don’t understand DNS, the backbone of the Active Directory installations which they’ve been “managing” for years. They don’t understand firewalls, they don’t understand Kerberos, they simply don’t understand.
Today, I had a guy give me shit because I’d asked him to remotely manage a computer then change the members of the local administrators group on that machine. He “couldn’t,” he whined, and what’s more, it was getting “frustrating” because he kept getting an access denied message. Nwaaah!
This color-by-numbers Administrator didn’t take the infinitesimal time required to look at whether the account he was using to manage the computer account was actually able to make the changes.
I don’t know, but if I’d received an “access denied” message, the first inclination would be to ask why then, following a somewhat logical path, I’d probably arrive at a suitable answer sooner or later. Sometimes the good is better than the best, but you’ve got to know what “the good” looks like and boy, some people don’t wanna know what “the good” looks like.
Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
Until next time, Colostomy bags, fuck you!
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