Graham, you are once again behaving in appalling fashion. EVERY crime that you are accusing others of, you have committed to me. I've spent quite a lot of time and trouble talking to you, including times when you were desperately unhappy - and you have turned your back on me and walked away when someone younger and female and cute has walked in. I have sent you more than one friendly email, and received no replies at all. You have insulted me on the board here. I have taken all this because you are a troubled young man and I'd like to help, largely in gratitude for the huge contributions you have made for the running of this board. That's why I've bought you quite a few drinks at FAPs, and why I haven't moaned that you've never offered to buy me one. My best efforts don't mean that you should treat me as a friend or like me - you're perfectly free to think me an old tosser and want nothing to do with me - but if you treat people a hundred times worse than they treat you, your room for legitimate complaint is very small.
This row did not start from your being mistreated in any way. Alan tried out something he thought might work. He's a very clever and skilled man, and it did little if any harm as far as I could see, and there was certainly nothing wrong in his giving it a try - a lot of SQL performance issues can only really be settled by trying them out in real conditions. If there was really a slowdown in performance, why not just tell him so in an email and either of you could have switched back (or tried something new again, whatever). Why insult him publicly? The worst he did was make an entirely understandable mistake while trying to improve matters. You might be a better coder than Alan, I wouldn't know, but I have a job where I am currently basically in charge of and supervising a number of programmers and helping them write better code, including tuning their SQL and so on, and I would never treat any of these people the way you have behaved here. I'd expect real disciplinary trouble if any senior person behaved that way, and the fact that there is no such structure here doesn't make your actions any better.
― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 13 June 2003 16:01 (twenty-two years ago)