Und Jetzt: I Vent

I'm currently irritated with my neighbor in a neighborly, good-natured kind of way.

I currently have a rather large heap of crushed granite in front of the house to be spread over the front yard, and my neighbor keeps drifting over to see if I need help spreading said crushed granite.

The problem with that is this: he wants to use his new New Holland tractor to spread it, while I want to use my shovel to spread it. He's not concerned with my gravel per se; he just wants to push stuff around with his tractor.

Don't get me wrong, I don't blame him. If I owned his tractor, I'd probably try to find a way to make it wash windows and vacuum the carpet, so I understand his deep desire to push stuff around.

But here's the deal. I am, by profession, more or less a software engineer. The stuff I produce can't really be seen, touched, felt, heard or tasted. It does what needs to be done, but it's not tangible. I can't point at it and say "Yep, that's what I did." Writing software pays the bills and I take a certain amount of pride in writing good software, but software just doesn't give me any sense of accomplishment. None. Zero. Zip.

So I do things with my hands. I built a bulldozer blade and a box scraper for my lawn tractor out of scrap iron and a roll of welding wire, not because I needed them that much, but because building stuff makes me feel useful in ways that writing software doesn't. I like to collect random rocks out of the dry wash behind the house and landscape with them. I like to dig holes. I like to build walkways. I like to cut wood into pieces, and then nail them back together in new configurations.

I take my software seriously, and it does important stuff. But it doesn't fullfill me the way building some stupid thing with my hands does. Here are two sample conversations:

"This is the software I wrote. You can't see what it does, but it toggles some bits in a register and reads another register and... well... It's not very exciting, is it?"

"This is a walkway I built. Its function is obvious, and its permanence makes me feel that I have contributed something to the world."

So now we come back to my neighbor and his deep need to spread my gravel. To him, it's just something he can do with his tractor, and I don't fault him for that. And in truth he is an extremely nice guy, and if I had his tractor, I'd probably use it to spread the gravel too.

But to me, the pile of gravel isn't just a pile of gravel, a mere task to be discharged and ticked off a list. It represents self-actualization and a sense of self-worth, and I swear to God if he drives his tractor on my self-actualization and sense of self-worth, I'm going to freak!

In a good-natured, neighborly kind of way, of course.