PSA: I am neither suicidal nor dumb

[maradydd]

Man, you take apart a monitor at a party and everyone wants to know what the hell you're doing.

I mean, L. and I had a perfectly good reason for it: it was a hacker party, we were working on hacking together a high-voltage power supply from a CFL and the flyback transformer from an elderly CRT, the setting and the task at hand seemed to go well together. Within a few minutes of arriving, we met a guy who had taken apart many, many CRTs before, and who was quite happy to hang back and give helpful tips. That was great, and I was equally happy to give the twenty or so people who wandered by in the next hour and a half a quick explanation of what we were up to. ("We're making a Jacob's Ladder, so we need a flyback transformer. Later we're going to use the power supply for another project, but a Jacob's Ladder seemed like a great way to test it.")

Where it got annoying, though was the couple or five people who basically demanded we justify our right to plunge our hands into the guts of a sacrificial monitor. "Isn't that going to release dangerous gases?" No, that's only if we break the tube, and we're not going to do that. "Those transformers can hold a lot of charge even after the monitor's off." Yes, and not only has this monitor not been turned on in two years, L. held a screwdriver across the leads to discharge any remaining charge. "But what do you need that strong of a power supply for?" A Jacob's Ladder sounded like fun, dammit.

The absolute best exchange, though, went something like this:

WELL-MEANING BUT ANNOYING PERSON: Does anyone here actually study electrical engineering?
maradydd, grinning: Not me!
L, grinning even larger: Why yes, in fact I do.

The irony, of course, is that L. is getting his PhD in electrical engineering because that's where they decided to put the cryptographers. Me? I build radios and do the odd bit of electrical work on cars.

I'm half tempted, if I do a hardware project at one of these things again, to print out a sign that reads YES, I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING, PLEASE DO NOT INTERRUPT ME.

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

It is definitely much more of a software event, although a goodly number of people seemed quite pleased to see hardware hackers there too. roadknight brought his robot, too, and graciously loaned us his long-handled Phillips when it turned out I'd forgotten mine.

I'm taking the long view, and looking at it as a matter of exposing people to things they're unfamiliar with (and might bitch about) in the hopes of (1) getting them thinking about things they haven't done before and (2) meeting people who I can learn from. Helpful CRT Guy was helpful, gave us lots of tips which proved valuable, and asked difficult questions which helped me refine my understanding of what I was doing, so that was great.

(I can't help but wonder if there would have been so many questions if you'd both been male.)

You know, I wondered that myself, but I decided pretty quickly that the best response was just to forge on ahead, regardless of what anyone else thought. I think if someone believes "oh, girls can't do X" and chides a girl for working on X, then sees her ignore their dire warnings and succeed, they might begin to realise that girls certainly can do X and are more likely to succeed if people don't get in their way.

(Needless to say, I'll be bringing the completed Jacob's Ladder to the next party.)

[kragen.livejournal.com]

I can't believe it took me until this point in the thread to realize that sexism might have been a factor in the inept people trying to be helpful.

[kragen.livejournal.com]

Um, pardon my deeply-nested grammatical structure. I'm sleepy and I've been hacking elisp.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I really don't think sexism had anything to do with it, myself.