A lot of people say to me “But it’s the principle” and then really really bad things tend to happen.
Whenever I am confronted with this I like to quote the late great Groucho Marx “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others”. A comic and philosophic genius… movies kinda sucked but still…
The picture below has nothing to do with principles or Groucho Marx… I just like the image of a pretty girl getting all kung-fu with her girlfriends while they all talk bizoid speak. Sometimes I like to think that all three are school principles letting off some steam heh heh heh.
I’m always surprised when someone talks about punishing someone else because ‘there’s a principle involved.’
My understanding of principles is that they are your moral guidelines, not that they are your set of operating instructions for escalating to Armageddon.
Usually, when someone uses ‘principle’ in this way, I translate it to, “self-serving justification for retaliation, often wildly out of context to what just happened.” May not work for others, but that has always seemed appropriate to the situation.
Murray @ Midnight
Couldn’t agree with you more Midnight…. the other stock standard self-serving phrase that really gets my goat up (and he doesn’t like getting early unless food is involved) is “it’s the policy” or the variation on that being the “that’s how we’ve always done it”. Drives me INSANE and much like my imaginary goat Johnson, I hate being driven anywhere and particularly to Insane… followed closely by Toowoomba and any driving that can be termed a roadtrip. Just sayin’ and Johnson agrees if I let him sleep in a little longer. Freakin’ smelly devil eyed animal that he is.
…….and yet no comment from the midnight regarding this post’s supporting image… I mean come on man… give me a testify for crying out loud! TESTIFY!
Darren Saturday said:
I hear you. I feel your emotional anguish at bizarre, arbitrary rules put forward as personal policies. I know this one guy who won’t let you use the bathroom at his place. Madness. And this other guy who won’t go on roadtrips. Insan… wait… they’re the same guy!
I must hunt this man down and make sure he is punished with the age-old ritual of being hit by multiple heavy schoolbags from a number of unexpected directions.
It’s how we rolled in school. It’s definitely a guideline.
Murray @ Midnight
Darren Saturday said:
I have the following brief statement to make:
HAS ANYONE SEEN MY CAR KEYS? THEY HAVE TO BE HERE SOMEWHERE, BECAUSE MY CAR IS PARKED OUTSIDE. THERE IS NO WAY I COULD HAVE, FOR EXAMPLE, HOTWIRED IT TO GET IT HOME, IN CASE THAT CROSSES YOUR MIND. I AM NOT AT ALL MECHANICALLY-APTITUDED, WHICH HAS ALWAYS MADE ME FEEL THAT I SHOULD BE LESS SECURE ABOUT MY MASCULINITY, EXCEPT THAT WHO HAS TIME FOR THAT?
That is all.
Murray @ Midnight
I always try to make time to concern myself with things that fall well outside of my direct control or influence… it’s kinda of a policy of sorts.
Darren Saturday said:
I wish I understood what you mean by this. It’s like… it’s like you’re practically begging for a schoolbagging.
Murray @ Midnight
Oh, and hey, as to the picture of the three women, what’s going on here is the interlayering of attractive women kicking the hell out of each other to demonstrate that Smart Objects totally dominate Service Layers and Procedural Code.
Smart Objects, in this context, are pieces of code that are aware, but not in a ‘Terminator, Rise Of The Deathmachines’ kind of way. Instead, they’re aware of how to do all (but probably not all) of the back-of-house stuff of getting data and updating data and communicating to other objects and whatnot so that you, the developer, don’t have to waste your time figuring out that you spent the last 3 days writing procedural code to talk to a SQL Server backend when your data layer is, in fact, being delivered by MySQL, which will make you want to stab coworkers with a letter-opener. In theory, your Smart Object should just be able to solve all of that frontier code-wrangling hassle so you can spend a lot more time trying to figure out the problems with getting the Smart Object itself to work the way they said it would in the product fact sheet.
Murray @ Midnight
….well sure but I just like seeing pretty girls fight…n’stuff before they…you know…kinda makeup.