logoalt Hacker News

hombre_fatallast Sunday at 8:21 AM3 repliesview on HN

I lived a year in a great hostel run by a German girl in Mexico.

She was always planning social events, hyping the place so that it was full of interesting people, and more. It was the most social part of my life even though I was 30.

But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.

Other guests would often complain about her, and they would phrase it as if she’d be cool if only she could turn down that one aspect about her. I had the same reaction at first too.

But eventually it became painfully obvious to me that that’s not how people work. Because the quirk you’re complaining about is the same quirk that got her to start a successful hostel across the world that we’re all enjoying.

We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.


Replies

munificentlast Monday at 9:10 PM

> We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.

I've noticed this too, and my pet theory is that it's yet another toxic side effect of pervasive consumerism. We get so used to being able to find that one product whose feature list is exactly what we want, that we end up carrying that same micro-managing expectation into other areas of life. We've lost the ability to appreciate things holistically.

jancsikalast Sunday at 8:14 PM

> But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.

My audio subsystem behaves exactly the same way!

Sometimes I'll send it a simple email politely asking to grab the block of samples it just sent to the soundcard and replace them with different samples that I've included as an attachment. It always makes this rude clicking noise at me which I do not appreciate at all.

I guess it's too much to ask to just take a little time to fashion a polite response while also hitting soft realtime deadlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

salvesefulast Sunday at 5:36 PM

where in mexico? sounds really cool