Salut monde ~ Stutterers and Foreigners

Let's see. Neither a poet, journalist, writer, director, salesman, materialist, specialized hobbyist, egocentric nor ethnocentric and yet here we are with a blog. The reason? Just to test out UX, themes, scripts, imaging and perhaps share my paintings and random rants. One can not test User eXperience without a number of paragraphs and other objects, and so we begin with an interesting sociological eXperience.
There once was a company, filled with hardcore programmers, and by this, we mean the ones who are engineers as well. That ilk of human that reads a textbook and commits it to memory for life. They love the concrete nature of mathematics and science, albeit both delve into the world of uncertainty and discovery when you are on the cutting edge. These are the sort that tend to avoid the edge chaos, also known as the order for which we have yet to understand.

Granted, being the sort that judges things in black and white does not mean that they lack compassion in their lives. Both of the directors were lively in their individual ways and not afraid to venture the event horizons of life's vortexes.

Mr. Sudonaam was the taller of the two directors and upon building their new building, he was ecological enough to assure that the brick wall included special bricks for small birds to make homes within. Sudonaam also loved to play golf, and once even came down from the chateau in Peebles, Scottland to join in a slightly rainy par three course. He knew how to take a street and make it into a cholesterol free artery, flowing smoothly as congested as possible and put the logistics down on paper in simple math for even the layman to understand. Now, one can say that Sudonaam stuttered, but it was nearly unnoticeable. He had attended classes to find ways to lesson the pronounced nature of it. Perhaps this is also why lenience was given to another employee, who was completely capable and dedicated to his position and children, but truly stuttered.

At end of every weekly company meeting, everyone of the employees was given an opportunity to table questions and share the status of the projects they were assigned. When it came time for one who stuttered to speak, not one colleague would interrupt nor complete their sentence. Of course it was often in the industry's technical jargon and it was my third language, so I could always wait for the punch line, but I could see the others already knew the following word to come. Despite their foresight, never once did they complete their sentences for them.

Now, it was my turn and sometimes in your third language, you find that perfect word in two other languages, but you simply can't find it in your third. At that moment of hesitation, your colleagues will feel free to jump in and complete your sentences for you. To some degree, I was thankful as perhaps the word afforded in kindness would be a pearl to be remembered. Most often the word would be one that you knew, but felt that it was incomplete in its application.

This interesting difference of social interaction with foreigners and stutterers is probably due to the concept that the later is an affliction, whereas the former is ignorance. A friend and I were laughing about how it would have been had I been boss. In all likelihood, the team would have waited for me to look-up the desired but incorrect translation on an iPad and not even do as much as snicker.

I do miss that company. It was amazing how within a few weeks, I was producing front-end interfaces in libraries which I had never previously used. It is regrettable that my mastery of the local spoken language was never geared for mastery, as it was with French, because it does put me at a disadvantage of being convincing. When I suggested that we also provide our interfaces on the mobile platform, it was kindly rejected and yet before the end of the first year, another colleague was working on a mobile app.

C'ést la vie, c'ést la guerre, c'ést bonne et jusqu'ici tout va bien.