Law the First: People Suck. "People suck" is often misinterpreted in the context of my work in
Information Technology... it does not mean "Non-techies are people who suck", it means that human beings are
continually driven to push their toys past breaking point and then cry to the skies that the toy is broken.
I am people, and I suck. So do you. If you meet someone perfect, join their monastery and hope to learn, but I
can promise you there won't be any computers in there. Why not? Because,
Law the Second: Computers Suck. As our first attempt at recreating ourselves, computers are an
excellent example of why we suck. Like us, they are flexible, general purpose systems designed through the
time-honored bandaid accretion methodology, and then asked to perform like a Platonic ideal at seventeen million
different functions at once. The marvel is that they work at all, not that they suck.
Law the Third: Work Sucks. Does this really need explanation? Let's just point out that the
addition of a financial component to endeavors of engineering and creativity greatly reduces the final product's
quality. The hard part of a bit of design is the last few percent of functionality needed to reach perfect
behavior in corner cases; that's the stuff that gets cut when budget constraints or competition force early
release, and that's the stuff that sucks.
Law the Fourth (Corrolary): People Working on or with Computers CUBE the Suckitude.
