The trouble having a spouse who’s smarter than I am

Posted by E-George on April 27, 2007

Recently (like last week) I started a consulting company, because I had a request to do some work in a consulting capacity.  Made sense, I thought.  My first activity involved building a simple web form that emails the form submission contents.  Not hard, at all.  I grabbed a (relatively) simple free CSS and got to work.  I thought it looked good, and I’m sure it did.

Matthew is incredibly smart.  He’s clearly the valedictorian of programming.  And technology.  And beer butt chicken.

The confluence of those two statements are as follows:  I asked Matthew to help me figure out a problem I was having on one of the web pages, which he was wholeheartedly willing to do.  He beat me home last night and started looking at the problem.  Had I been home when he started I’m sure I would have heard the violent gyrations of a once sane man clawing desperately at his eyes, the sort of desperation that only comes out of a seasoned programmer when they’re forced into looking at the primitive cave scratchings of a newbie.  Before I had even gotten home that night, Matt had hacked apart my work and almost completely rewritten it so it was smarter, cleaner, more managable, and, well, better.  What took me 12 hours to produce, he shredded and put back together in 3.  Impressive.  Most impressive.  All I could do was sit and watch, mouth agape, at the incredible alacrity with which he solved what I assumed were difficult problems.   It would seem evident that they are only difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Note to self: Keep trying.  Just try harder.  Like watching a ballerina flit across the stage, barely touching the ground as she flounces about to the beat of the music, watching Matthew program was like watching poetry in motion. Loudly-clacking-keyboard-curse-word-muttering-furrowed-brow poetry.

Filed Under: Thank you, and GOOD NIGHT! - Comments:



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