I’m not really a people person. I’ve said so for years. My old college roommate, Joe, had a better way to put it, but the way he said it is unfortunately not suitable for print. Frankly, not being a people person is a good part of the reason I went into IT in the first place. People don’t seem to ever do what I want them to do, so I found it more comfortable to work with computers. They are easier to control.

This basic realization, however, has lately started worrying me a lot. Not being a people person does not bother me personally all that much. The problem is that I seem to be working in an industry full of people like me. We all seem to have gotten into computers because we were not quite what you may call "normal." My long-lost friend Rob Kolstad once had a very good way to describe Linux users that epitomizes the problem: "What do you mean there is no driver for that printer? Guess I’ll just have to write one." While many of us probably would not resort to writing drivers, we certainly would not think twice about tweaking the parameters of one, and most people who write software today could probably write a driver—whether they could write one without a security hole is a different matter though.