Happy Sherlock Holmes Day! This is the day all Sherlockians celebrate, as well as being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday.
I’ve had a long history with the world’s best known consulting detective. The Holmes stories were some of the first stories I read, and I was hooked. I may not have understood all the nuances of the stories and the character’s motives for their dastardly deeds, I was eight after all, but I was enamored of Holmes and Watson. My fondest desire at the time was to be Sherlock Holmes. Not to be like him, to be him. I wanted to live in 221B Baker Street, upstairs from Mrs. Hudson, and not having to deal with people. I could stay inside and spend my time studying cigar ash, or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge. Those stories cemented my love of the mystery genre and lead to a lifetime long enjoyment of it.
My eight-year-old self wanted to be able to read people with just a glance, to be able to understand their thinking and their personalities. At that age, people perplexed me to no end. In many ways, they still do. I don’t ‘get’ many social interactions. I used to work with a guy who drove me nuts because he had a very deadpan sense of humor. I had no way of being able to tell if he was being serious or being a jerk and setting up some sarcastic joke. I’ve had people ask me if the wife is annoyed about something. From my perspective, she’s fine. Only later I find out she was pissed off about something. I take people at their word and if they say they are going to do something, I expect they will do it, which has worked to my detriment over the years.
Holmes would take a look at someone coming to him to for help and already know half of the mystery. He could tell what they did for a living, their mental state, their level of truthfulness, all sorts of things. He would know about the problem they were bringing to him before they could tell him about it. I have not developed that ability. I still find people perplexing.
Animals on the other hand, I understand. What Holmes does with people, I can do with dogs. I get their personalities, and their demeanor, within a few seconds of meeting them. I know when they are happy, sad, scared, or anxious. I can deal with them. Cats, given time, I can commune with. They are a little more difficult than dogs and tend to be more arrogant. (I’ve often said I don’t have a cat as a pet because I don’t want to come home at the end of a day’s work to something more arrogant than I am.) Put me in a room full of people, like at a party, and if there is an animal there, I’ll most likely get along with said animal better than any of the people.
I get logic, and structure, and order, like Holmes. That’s probably why I became a programmer. You (usually) know when you have code written correctly. It works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you get an error code, you update your code to fix the problem, and it runs. Design flaws are a little harder. Your code may run correctly, without any errors, but may not do what you expected. Those are the types of problems Holmes dealt with. He didn’t take on the simple cases, the low-level code equivalent types of problems. He took on the more challenging ones, the ones that didn’t make sense util he gathered more data and put the pieces together – the higher level design problems. Those were always the most interesting problems in programming.
I didn’t grow up to be Sherlock Holmes, or even much like him, which I’m sure disappoints my eight-year-old self. I still hold out hope that one day I’ll ‘crack the human code’ and then I’ll be able to understand people the way Holmes did. Should that happen, I think I’ll have an easier time navigating through his world. Until then, I can keep trying to think like Holmes.
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