Sometimes you don’t know where to draw the line between OCD and the strive for excellence. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference or does it?
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is terrible and has made lives of millions a living hell. This is just a comparison and in no way making light the suffering OCD patients go through every waking minute of their miserable lives.
I was lucky, or unlucky as some of my friends would say, to have started my career at an organization where the passion for excellence was a religion. Looking back, I think I drank more than my fair share of that Kool-Aid because I really can’t see quite a lot of that excellence there anymore. But that’s a story for another day.
Those were days we believed we could do anything and nothing but the best matters. It affected my life; I ended up striving to get things done properly. Let me be truthful, to get some things done correctly. For the rest, I couldn’t give a damn.
I haven’t and may not reach perfection, but I never lost that drive. For a lot of my colleagues and friends, it can be an annoying nervous tick from an over-caffeinated dude struggling with a mid-life crisis. What has the straightness of a table got to do with excellence?
Maybe it has a lot to do with it.
I’ve always been amazed at well-made things – buildings, furniture, accessories, electronics, websites, and even well-written articles. I’ve since driven my unfortunate colleagues mad with that maniacal catchphrase “we should be the best.” Whatever that means.
IMHO, the underpinning of excellence isn’t about where you are but never losing the desire to get better every day or week (depends on your schedule :-)). It has helped me in a lot of ways. For example, even though my blog (this one you are reading, or what do you expect?) is riddled with more grammatical errors than the grains of sand at Eleko Beach but then it never matters to me. Show me, and I will correct them. Teach me, and I will learn. I get better every day!
No story better captures this than the quest of a man to rid Wikipedia of one single grammatical error: Comprise of. Now, I’m not a language buff, but it has been argued that this is bad English. He’s done thousands of edits and has been sworn at by thousands of Wikipedians for his overbearing manner. Who cares? He’s probably using that to calm the demons demanding perfection in his feverish soul.
Is it worth it? Maybe, after all, I think a straight table with chairs neatly tucked is also worth it.
Category: General
Read about Adedeji’s take on technology, payments, financial inclusion, career, and credit.
Old geeks die hard
So here I’m, sitting and swearing at my desk trying to solve a server side graphing problem. How did I end up here?
You see, I should have transitioned from geek to management but the devil inside some computer just wouldn’t leave my tail alone. I have got that long thing trapped in a server door. Lord have mercy.
Anyway, what’s make some hair gray is that Adobe, in its tiny non-existent wisdom, made a mess of charting in CF11. I bet I’m the last person (OK, including some random dude in my office) left on earth who still do sh*t in Coldfusion. So I spent the whole day trolling the web like a serial killer, looking for some random piece of whatever to solve this problem.
Meanwhile I already preached the parable of the bulldog to my unfortunate colleagues yesterday. A bulldog, as long as it isn’t in Calabar, never gives up. So how dare I give up on this today? Truth is, I think I made up that parable. I can’t even remember if a bulldog doesn’t run away at the slightest sound of trouble.
Which bull dog wants a stone on the head?
I need a hefty lunch.
Hacking your way into the company of gods
Lucy was a thoroughly shitty movie. It was so bad I was physically restrained at the cinemas from crawling into the screen and giving everyone an uppercut; not even Scarlett Johansson could distract me.
Ok, that wasn’t possible but my-my, I wish I could.
The deeper narrative wasn’t lost on me, though – humanity has forever daydreamed about making itself better, go above the laws of physics, and just become a nuisance to the neighbors. Maybe that’s why we invented religion. That’s another story entirely.
Let’s be frank; we have tried – we have flown five times faster than the speed of a crying baby’s wail, gone to the moon and back, we have smartphones, and oh, Nigeria even dealt with Ebola! But we are still unsatisfied. We want to be gods!
Meanwhile, I sat here at my desk wondering how my dull day would end and then bumped into an interesting article at The Verge. Not the usual place the normal guys crawl, but that’s my joint.
It’s estimated that about 100,000 unlucky souls today are plumbed with electrical impulses to fight pain and depression (you could have Bovi come around to make you forget your sorry life for half the price of the surgery). However, what if we go beyond making a sad man laugh and decide to augment our mental abilities? What if a consistent set of interfaces and protocols come into play that would allow us to tweak memory, maturity, reactions, or maybe someone would be able to reverse intelligence and give some of the dull people I know a bit of smart for a try?
It is scary to think about the significance of this. At first, I was an advocate of enhancing our body with bionic parts – smart eyes that can read the news and all that sh*t and ears that could discern gist from a mile off. This is bigger; this is godliness at the photonic level!
By the way, woe betides you if your brain crashes, freezes of gets Dosed by Chinese hackers.
There is a time when I wanted tech advancement just for the sake of it, but for the first time, I’m scared out of my pink boxers and afraid of what humans could do to humanity. Let me be out of here before Putin gets this done.
Time for the long drive home; where are my car keys? Damn, I need a brain implant.
Nothing Good Lasts Forever
When I moved to the Android world the first thing I kicked off was the inglorious Samsung keyboard for Swiftkey. It felt so good.
Like everything that looks too good to be true it didn’t allow me to enjoy it too long. It started dragging my phone badly with typed messages taking seconds to appear. Sometimes as long as 5 seconds.
I haven’t been known for patience so I promptly kicked its butt out for something more in use but less popular. Google Keyboard.
So far its working like charm but let’s see how long that lasts before I hit the divorce courts.
Enough said
I recently bumped into this article which got me thinking: http://qz.com/254477/its-time-to-accept-this-fact-a-really-great-marriage-is-rare/
I know quite a lot of people would eagerly love to use me for target practice but then taking the risk, I could just ask – is marriage an evolutionary con that’s gonna bottom out some day?
For all we know, I could be very wrong. After all, I have been wrong about so many things.