(no subject)

[owlectomy]

Ten minutes before closing, a woman asks me to look up an address on the computer. I do so, and she marvels at the convenience computers provide. "The wife of the guy who invented that, she's a lucky woman!"

I do not tolerate casual assumptions about men and women when I'm coming off a full day's work. "Did you know," I say, "One of the main contributors to the development of the first computers was a woman?"

Pwned.

Comments

[dianamcqueen.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are much more capable than I in situations like that.
I woulda fucking blown a gasket internally and prolly sprained something.

his wife is lucky....ugh. UGH.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I'm just glad I knew about Lovelace. (And, IIRC, a LOT of the people who worked on the Turing machine in the 1940s were women, because so many of the men were in active combat roles at the time.) Were it not for her, I can imagine I'd have been angry at the assumption but without any evidence to back up my anger.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Err, let me amend that to those who worked at Bletchley Park cracking the codes produced by the Enigma Machine; the Turing Machine is something else entirely.

[dianamcqueen.livejournal.com]

Thank you for enlightening me and giving me a powerful rebuttal to stupid programmer geeks I may stumble across in the future :D

[littlebutfierce]

In my continuing quest to bring PopCo into as many conversations as possible (apparently!!)--embarrassingly I don't know if I knew about Ada Lovelace until that book... tho' it's not like I knew v. much about the history of computing either.

I didn't know about Bletchley Park until that novel either! And the protagonist's grandmother (not grandfather) worked there during the war.

(& yeah, I agree that you handled that situation v. well!)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Ooh! I have had PopCo on my desk at the library for, like, weeks, but then the award season hit and I felt obliged to put my non-YA reading aside. I really want to read it now.