Thursday 18 April 2013

Little detective stories


One great thing in detective stories is the surprise when the identity of the murderer is revealed. Even it's a lot of twists and unexpected events - it doesn't require too much effort.


I had this book when I was 6. Little booklet, rather, including a hundred of detective stories. Each of them was couple of pages long, described a small scene and a tiny event maybe - and somebody got cut of mugged or killed at the end. And you had to find who did it. All the details were hidden in the scene. Maybe an object, a gesture, but you needed that clue in order to get the case. I loved it, however that also was quite limited. No chance for a new explanation and it really lead to one conclusion.

On the contrary in real life you won't have these guides. You really have to watch everything, look for connections. Maybe you won't find it at all. Maybe it's just too boring to accept it. The way it works you try to limit the scope of the item, what purpose it's used, if used. The origination. Sometimes it's not an item but an action. An unexpected behavior of a person. As one said - there is a story behind every warning. (Such as the McDonalds hot drink sign.)

You can see quite a lot of them, to be honest. I see it all the time. If you look at people carefully, their clothes, their move, or a spoken hint of an experience.

I like the way it keeps your brain busy, constantly mapping out scenarios and evaluating them. For a year I could not figure out how my croissant rotated by 180 degrees when I cut to half.

And sometimes - as you may guessed it already - that's how we try to hunt down bugs. We regenerate them, read about it on Google and think. Being a real life detective can be romantic. It's a journey, without a doubt. I just don't want to ask the guy why he is doing that thing. I want to find it out. But codes are a different story. No matter how much I'm into it - it's still not romantic. I remember couple of years ago I constantly turned to my smart mates when I had a problem. And always they asked: "what's in the code?". And I did not know, I didn't check it. No idea why. Since then I rather look at the code, before I think. And it indeed works. I realized fearing the code is silly, you get used to it pretty soon. And at the same time you learn how it works.

Do you have any tiny detective stories?

---

Peter

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.