Waiting For The Bus
I get a lot of random questions in my job, mostly from people I don't know who have somehow heard that I'm the guy to ask when you have a random question. (The fact that I generally answer them probably contributes to this reputation.) Often these questions are deeply technical, but every now and then there's a question that can be answered by application of common-sense real-world principles, and it makes me wonder why they had to ask me at all.
A couple days ago someone asked me a question about multi-threaded programming, which is a programming technique whereby a program can be doing two things at once and parts of the program can be waiting for other parts to finish. Like, you want Outlook to keep on repainting its user interface even when it is off talking to the mail server. Multithreaded programming can be very tricky, and the user had a question that boiled down to "I'm waiting for an event, but I cannot know if the event has already happened, in which case it will never happen again. What do I do?"
Well geez, what would you do if you were waiting for the bus, but you didn't know whether it had already come by or not and had no way of finding out? There is only one strategy which makes sense, and that is "wait for some amount of time, and if the bus doesn't come, give up and find some other way to get home." (Of course, extreme versions of this strategy are "wait zero time before you give up", and "never give up; wait forever if you have to", but ultimately, that's the only strategy there is given the constraints of the problem.) It's not like computers have some magic in them that affords some additional strategy!
Questions that can be answered by common sense aren't the ones that really peeve me though. Questions that can be correctly answered by typing the question's nouns into any search engine, which are nevertheless addressed to me to answer, are the ones that really irk me. If I had a nickel for every time someone with a freakin' degree in computer science asked me "hey Eric, where's your blog?", a question which can be answered in a tenth of a second by typing "Eric Lippert blog" into Google or MSN Search, I could afford a cup of coffee in this town.
Good thing I don't drink coffee.