My wife and children make fun of my speed of ironing (pressing) clothes. I seem to take about 3-4 times the amount of time they normally take. After a bit of analysis I came to the following conclusions:
- I use ironing time as thinking time. So I seem to mindlessly do the same thing over and over again. I can easily go into an infinite loop and not mind at all since it gives me more time to think/daydream.
- I drift into thinking about better design of iron, better design of iron board, ironing robots, wrinkle free clothes and anything but the process of ironing. This seems to be a common pattern in my life.
- Ironing and listening to music and day dreaming seem to be very complimentary.
- I think I am spoiled by the ironing service in my street in Chennai. I ping them to see if they are available. I send a bunch of washed, wrinkled clothes and get back neatly pressed clothes. This transaction is a bit asynchronous. Ping, request, response, payload trigger images of http request/response.
- This drift, if it lasts long enough, gets me to the meta think mode. I notice that tech terms like meta are seeping into my speech fairly frequently – asynchronous requests, symmetric relationships, lazy evaluation are some of the more common terms.
- I bug my wife with some of this terminology and concepts for real life actions. Some times I tell her in a shopping mall – “Let us do this in parallel. You can do this, this and this and I will do this. We can synch up after we finish”.
- I know I drift. This post itself is one of those examples with thoughts triggering other thoughts.