When I was 14, my father was stationed in Japan. I went rock climbing with this kid from school. He fell and got injured, and I had to bring him to the hospital. We came in through the wrong entrance, and passed this guy in the hall. He was a janitor. My friend came down with an infection, and the doctors didn’t know what to do. So they brought in the janitor. He was a doctor. And a Buraku—one of Japan’s untouchables. His ancestors had been slaughterers, gravediggers. And this guy knew that he wasn’t accepted by the staff, didn’t even try. He didn’t dress well. He didn’t pretend to be one of them. People around that place didn’t think he had anything they wanted, except when they needed him—because he was right, which meant that nothing else mattered. And they had to listen to him.
“We are selfish, base animals crawling across the earth. But because we got brains,
if we try real hard, we may occasionally aspire to something that is less than pure evil.”
Once we have achieved unerring correctness in all domains obscure or not, all we have to do is contrive a situation in which our correctness is useful and in which others will require our knowledge. Then we will be respected.
Yeah, I really thought that was true at some point… but as it turns out, being good at fixing broken Windows computers hasn’t made me respected, just commodified. :-)
That’s probably because the people whose computers you fix do not understand how difficult what you do is—or if they do, they also understand that another way to fix it is to reinstall the operating system.
When I was 14, my father was stationed in Japan. I went rock climbing with this kid from school. He fell and got injured, and I had to bring him to the hospital. We came in through the wrong entrance, and passed this guy in the hall. He was a janitor. My friend came down with an infection, and the doctors didn’t know what to do. So they brought in the janitor. He was a doctor. And a Buraku—one of Japan’s untouchables. His ancestors had been slaughterers, gravediggers. And this guy knew that he wasn’t accepted by the staff, didn’t even try. He didn’t dress well. He didn’t pretend to be one of them. People around that place didn’t think he had anything they wanted, except when they needed him—because he was right, which meant that nothing else mattered. And they had to listen to him.
-- Dr. Greg House
-- Gregory House
Once we have achieved unerring correctness in all domains obscure or not, all we have to do is contrive a situation in which our correctness is useful and in which others will require our knowledge. Then we will be respected.
Yeah, I really thought that was true at some point… but as it turns out, being good at fixing broken Windows computers hasn’t made me respected, just commodified. :-)
That’s probably because the people whose computers you fix do not understand how difficult what you do is—or if they do, they also understand that another way to fix it is to reinstall the operating system.