Imagine you have a team mate who means well, but…you can’t always rely on him, let’s say. I call mine Dave. (No offence to the actual Daves I know, it’s just a good blokey name, and a nice play on 2001).

When Dave’s in the zone, he’s great! Very helpful. Maybe he had a good night’s sleep, or something. Doesn’t matter. Life is good.

But when he’s not in the zone…chaos. You just can’t rely on him. You can’t trust him to do anything important. You’ll give him the benefit of doubt a few times, but eventually you learn: Dave is not to be trusted, unsupervised.

You find yourself double-checking everything he says. Fact-checking every answer. You’re doing more work, not less. Finally, you admit to yourself that maybe it would be better if Dave wasn’t on the team.

But of course, you can’t let Dave go. The boss won’t let you. Dave can do no wrong in the boss’s eyes.

“He did really well in his tests, you know.” the boss tells you. “He’ll be doing your job one day”.

You tell the boss that Dave gets Azure resource tags and Docker image tags confused in conversations, but the boss just dismisses it with “Classic Dave”, chuckles, then wanders off, giving Dave a pay rise on the way.

Other team mates brush it off with “he’s just hallucinating”.

He’s not hallucinating, he’s confidently wrong. It’s different.

But Dave does one thing well. He’s an outstanding reader. He can speed-read a ton of docs, sum them up well, and even answer questions on them! At least he can save you having to read all the docs, right?

Dave does read fast, but he also gets confused very easily. He gets past and present confused. He latches onto keywords in disparate documents and makes erroneous connections.

Of course, you don’t know this at first, because you haven’t read the documents. But after losing hours, days, and weeks to meandering, cyclical conversations with Dave, you finally surrender to the thought you were trying to ignore in the first place. You have to read the docs.

That’s right. Dave has made you read the docs! Dammit, Dave!!!

But there’s always google, right? So you go to google for enlightenment, but who’s there? Dave!!! He’s everywhere now, and he’s broken Google! And probably Bing I imagine…

So here we are. Stuck with Dave. He’s not going anywhere, and so we have to work around him.

I give my Dave a colouring book. It passes the time while I study for the various certifications I now need to gain. Somebody has to know what the actual answer is.

I hear stories from my colleagues of their escapades with Dave. How Dave helped them with one thing or another. They will of course also tell me of the times he went off on one, but they don’t seem to mind.

I’m glad Dave has friends who rely on him. He’s not an idiot. He is perhaps a well-meaning idiot, but I’m glad I met him.

I’m glad he exists in this world, and we do still chat about things.

I just won’t let him drive me anywhere.