alexpgp | LJ Idol 5.22: On specialization...

I had come in to work early that Tuesday in March 1985. I was in a pretty good mood generally, and it didn't hurt that the source code tests I had run the previous night had turned out successfully. I was reviewing the test results when my boss arrived at work at his usual tardy hour and popped his head into my office on the way to his own.

"How're things going?" he asked.

"Everything is just peachy," I replied, "especially since there is hope yet for the cultural salvation of the republic." (Yes, I used to talk like that.) A beat passed.

"What do you mean?" asked my boss.

"Well, if a film about Mozart can win a bunch of Oscars," I said, with a twinkle in my eye, "then anything is possible." The previous evening, Milos Forman's film Amadeus had walked away with the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. I expected my boss to pick up the conversational ball and run with it - at least to the coffee urn - but instead, he perplexed me by asking:

"Who?"

"Mozart," I said, adding "Wolfgang. Amadeus. Mozart." From his look, I could tell the full name had been of no help.

"And who's that?" came the next question. The conversational ball had not only been left on the floor, but I started to suspect it had by now rolled out of the office, down the hall, and out of the building. I decided to disengage quietly.

"Oh, he… wrote music, a long time ago," I said. "Classical stuff." My boss grunted. A beat passed.

"Has anyone been nosing around?" he asked, rephrasing his original question and moving our conversation toward more familiar channels. I breathed an inward sigh of relief as routine reestablished itself. Life went on.

There are times, during fairly short conversations, when a tsunami of thoughts and impressions passes through my mind, and it had begun to happen during this brief exchange, in a big way. But when I fully realized that neither the name Mozart nor the film title Amadeus meant a blessed thing to my boss, I was… overcome. Disoriented. Folks around me might as well have started speaking Chinese.

In my view of the world, being out of touch with what is popular at the box office has long been forgivable, but for any educated person to be so narrowly focused in one's life as to not have picked up the name Mozart from somewhere, anywhere (if only by a kind of social osmosis), and placed it in the general context of "classical music" (even if one never listened to the stuff), was for me a positively twilight zone kind of event.

Then again, engineers have a reputation for being rather single-minded about their profession, as illustrated by the ancient joke about a doctor, a lawyer, and an engineer discussing the relative merits and demerits of having a lover as opposed to a spouse. At the end of the tale, after the doctor and lawyer have weighed in on opposite sides of the issue, the engineer comes down in the middle, saying that it is best to have both, "because while your spouse thinks you're with your lover, and your lover thinks you're with your spouse, you can be at the lab, doing research!" There is more than a germ of truth residing in that chestnut.

Having a narrow focus of interests is not a malady unique to techies, but many techies suffer from it (indeed, some even boast of it). In the end, it can serve as a weakness; an Achilles' heel, if you will, because you don't realize how vulnerable you are until you are put on the spot.

In my undergraduate days as an engineering major, I was better off than most. My mother had taught languages, my stepdad strove constantly to widen his technical and cultural horizons, and our house was filled with books on many subjects. I certainly knew who Mozart was (among others), had been a prodigious reader all though high school, and had a passing acquaintance with the arts and sciences.

By my university junior year, whatever putative "rounding" I had arrived with as a freshman had been chipped and chiseled into a strictly rectilinear set of interests in engineering and science. As was the case with many of my peers, the only thing of importance to me was to satisfy the "other" (nontechnical) graduation requirements in the most efficient manner imaginable, and then get out.

That's when I ran into Ed Czerwinski.

Ed Czerwinski was the chairman of the Slavic and Germanic Languages Department and had a reputation for giving just about everyone who enrolled for his classes an A grade. It was rumored that students who never showed up and never handed in any work got Bs. So, the six-credit Intensive Elementary Russian course he was teaching during the second half of my junior year seemed just the thing for this engineering major, who needed 6 credits of humanities to graduate.

The rumors about Ed's grading turned out to be overly optimistic. By week 3 of his course, I had pretty much reverted to form and had stopped coming to his class so as to concentrate on the important things in my academic life, like electrical science and fluid dynamics.

That week, he somehow managed to buttonhole me in the library. He told me that, in his opinion, having me in his class was an inspiration to the other students, and that my absence was having a deleterious effect on the group. Further, while he normally didn't care about who attended or did not attend his class and wasn't a big fan of the grading system, he so much as threatened me with a C if I didn't straighten up.

Others might have laughed at his threat. I straightened up.

A year later, at the start of the second semester of my senior year, Ed bumped into me again and offered me a deal I could not refuse: sign up as a Russian major, take the literature courses, and he'd wave his hands and poof, the grammar and composition requirements for the major would disappear, and I would graduate as a double major. Although this meant sticking around for another two semesters, schools around the country were still spewing too many engineers and teachers into the world (the result of Vietnam-era draft deferments), and my job-seeking efforts were coming up dry, so I agreed.

When I first arrived at the large room outside of the Slavic and Germanic Department's faculty offices - which I came to call "the bullpen" for the next three semesters - there was a lively dialogue going on among my new colleagues about Thomas Eagleton and his electroshock therapy, which had led to Eagleton's stepping down as George McGovern's vice presidential running mate at the beginning of August.

In the course of the debate, someone called the treatments Eagleton's "Achilles' heel," which led to even louder discussion of what, exactly, constituted an "Achilles' heel," at which point Ed came out of his office and ask us to pipe down.

"And while you're at it," he added, straight-faced, "consider what the cultural and linguistic consequences might have been had Achilles' mother decided to hold him by his private parts instead of his heel when she dipped him in the Styx!"

There was a moment of silence as we seriously considered the question, then we all had a laugh and the group started to break up. Ed motioned for me to join him in his office.

"I'm really glad you've decided to join our program," he said, once we were seated. "I think you'll find, over the years, that the excellent technical background you've acquired at the college of engineering will mesh very well with the kind of knowledge and the approach to finding it that you'll acquire here."

I was skeptical (for I still had the mindset of an undergraduate engineer). I frankly expected to spend my time in the department engaged in frilly scholarly finger-painting. Instead, I found the curriculum as interesting as engineering, fell in love with the works of Nabokov and Gogol, and when I did graduate, I was conscious of having grown intellectually in the interim. Along the way, I found that having an understanding of the technical end of life gave me an advantage over those whose focus had been confined to nontechnical subjects. The knife cuts in both directions.

Ed turned out to be right, though it would take far more space than a post like this to explain exactly why. (Heck, if it were so easy to explain at all, it would be common knowledge, and everyone would be doing it!) Still, perhaps an example might be illustrative…

A few years ago, I was interpreting at a dinner to mark the midpoint of a two-week technical meeting when the Russian delegation lead got up and, in the course of proposing a toast, started to quote Shakespeare. The import of the toast was quite impressive and weighty, as befitted the occasion.

My old boss, in my place, might have interrupted the speaker to ask, "Who, exactly, is this Shakespeare fellow?" Other technical interpreters of my acquaintance might have given a good, yet rough rendering of the quote, and gotten the message across but when I heard the Russian, I didn't hem or haw or ask for a clarification. Instead, I related the speaker's observation of "time being out of joint," quoting from Hamlet:

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

along with the rest of the toast, which was enjoyably received by the English-speakers in the room.

Afterward, the US delegation lead took me aside to express his appreciation for my work ("You make it look easy") and, by the way, for taking his counterpart down a peg, as the latter had a reputation for pompous puffery, which I had quietly deflated. This, it was hinted, would have ramifications in the following week's discussions. I had done well.

Specialization, it has been said, is for insects.

Cheers…

Current Location: Pagosa Springs, Colorado

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

crocotiger.livejournal.com

I fully agree with you, and not in words only, but in my whole life. I am educated in nuclear engineering, and I have studied English mainly for pleasure (also bits of Polish, Spanish and Japanese), I was the editor-in-chief of a nation-wide comic magazine for 12 years, studied astrology, scenical speech, worked in spheres of computers repair and marketing of barcode technology for retail.

Though all these careers were successful, sometimes I feel there are too many areas of knowledge for me and it could be better to specialize :)

From:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

LJ Idol 5.22: On specialization...

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