The Male of the Species

I enjoy spending time with my woman friends. We care about each other, and we show it by supporting each other's ideas and emotions. We'll let each other vent, making suggestions for possible solutions, but without denigrating the other's feelings or indicating that we know more than her on any topic.

Men, on the other hand …

The most telling movie scene, I believe, comes from "City Slickers", where the characters—several men and one woman—are all sitting around the campfire. The woman is questioning why the men only ever talk about sports. They ask what she and her friends talk about, and she answers, "Oh, relationships…".

This morning I sat down at my desk, and heard a conversation taking place over the cube wall. One guy's heat pump quit over the weekend, and I could hear various male voices offering solutions. I walked down the hall and past where they were standing, just to observe. There were no fewer than five guys clustered around the homeowner's cube. All were speaking, simultaneously at times, in loud, I-know-everything-about-everything voices. The conversation went on for, fully, ten or fifteen minutes. Every party to the conversation had advice for the homeowner, and each was sure his was the ultimate answer.

Now I will freely admit I am the Patron Saint of Repairmen. I'm not going to get on my back under the sink to fix a leak, or dig into the wires in the wall to change an outlet. I make a decent salary, and I spend a good chunk of it repairmen, who fix the problem and make it right. But even if I knew more about fixer-uppering than I do, I certainly wouldn't insist that my way was the only way.

I found it quite amusing that all these smart software developers had so many strong opinions about heat pumps and spent (wasted?) so much of the morning advising one of their own.

I guess it's all about the bonding, whatever form it takes.