Boring

So I was walking home with one of my neighbours last night, and quickly learned that work has turned me into one helluva boring person. Maybe my line of work (IT / computer programming) has something to do with that; I don't imagine my spiel about web services and the politics behind each company's interpretation of the spec would be classified as scintillating dinner conversation. And maybe all of my other high school / university / pre-full-time-work friends are getting that too.

With all the differences between our jobs, talking work lingo to one another would be like talking different languages. I can still talk computers and stuff to some of my pre-full-time-work friends, but we've all scattered to the four winds and found ourselves in different companies, different states of mind, different dimensions, or Germany.

So, outside of work, I look for the common ground in conversations. That neighbour I mentioned? I talked to him about the new pants I bought that day. That's right; pants.

Although there was that one time at a birthday party, where I didn't know anybody besides the birthday girl, I was talking with somebody else who works as a programmer. Once we both learned that fact about the other, it was pretty easy for us to let the geek subjects flow. But then we discovered we were on opposite sides in the ongoing civil war that is Java vs .NET, and we were practically at each other's throats after that.

So maybe it is just my line of work. Maybe why us programmers have so few people to talk with is because fanboy-ism causes us to murder one another.