Good Grief!

For some reason, I thought that attending a programmers’ user group meeting would be a good way to spend the evening of St. Patrick’s Day. I learned some useful things, but at what cost?

First of all, out of 50 or 60 attendees, no more than 5 were women. That means we’ve got a room full of testosterone discussing video games, talking trash about one another’s March Madness picks, and vying for any opportunity to display technical prowess. Woe upon the fool trying to make a presentation because this crowd has the answers to everything. It’s the video card! No! Adjust your resolution! You didn’t type the period! You have AN AMBIGUOUS REFERENCE for chrissake!

No one personifies this obnoxious mentality more than the president of the user group. He’s a big, loud guy in jeans who speaks in an authoritative tone of voice designed to imply that he’s been everywhere and done everything and his way is the best, amen. When he’s not presenting, he’s sitting with his feet on the table, taking shots at the poor bastard who is. When he is presenting, he answers audience questions in a patronizing tone; if he doesn’t know the answer, he makes a sarcastic remark and attempts to divert everyone’s attention by talking about basketball again. I had the audacity to ask a question, and the exchange went something like this:

ME: Does IIS have to be running on the database server for this product to work? [note: IIS is software that you put on a server (i.e., big computer) to turn it into a web server (i.e., big computer that has web pages)]

ANNOYING PRESIDENT GUY: Well, no, but why wouldn’t you run IIS on your database server?

ME: Our security group has a policy against that. They want to minimize the number of servers that run IIS. [note: IIS has been prone to security holes; whenever a security hole is discovered in IIS, servers that run it must be “patched”]

ANNOYING PRESIDENT GUY [rolling his eyes]: The only people having issues with IIS are people who don’t patch their servers.

ME: Well, it does make sense to try and minimize the number of servers you have to patch every time Microsoft come out with a security update.

ANNOYING PRESIDENT GUY: Ah, so your security group is too lazy to patch a bunch of servers!

PROPELLER-HEAD IN THE BACK [in a patronizing voice]: Microsoft hasn’t issued an IIS patch since [yesterday some date]

ANOTHER PROPELLER-HEAD IN THE BACK: WE run the web server and the database server together, and we haven’t had any performance issues.

ANNOYING PRESIDENT GUY: This isn’t a question of performance. Her organization has a stupid rule, I mean policy, against that configuration because some IT [information technology] departments are just myopic.

ME: [In my head]: I’m impressed that you can use the word myopic in a sentence. [Out load]: So does IIS have to be running on the database server for this product to work?

ANNOYING PRESIDENT GUY: No.

It was all I could do to refrain from running away and screaming, “I used so much Scotch tape on these fu*kers they’re processing information at 80 miles per hour! I’m the Greatest Fu*king Genius of All Time!” (Apologies to David Rees).