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I was running late for work the other day and ended up behind a moving wall. As traffic moved slowly along I had lots of time to smell the roses so to speak. I found myself reading the advertising information on a trailer in front of me when I noticed a fairly blatant spelling error in the text. I found myself wondering how the guy owning that landscaping business could have possibly missed the error. I toyed with the temptation of calling the number on the back of his trailer and asking if he knew the word was spelled incorrectly, but decided I didn’t care enough to take it any further than a quick snapshot of the text.

By now you hopefully noticed the term design is spelled desingn. For all I know the poor guy doesn’t speak a lick of english and has no idea how the word should be spelled. Maybe it’s intended to engage the attention of those who pay close enough attention to things to notice the error. My position holds that simple little error would keep me from writing down the phone number and calling for a quote on sprucing up the Wheadon yard. Call me picky, but if you want my landscaping business then you need to show me you care enough to present yourself with some attention to detail, and the back of that trailer totally missed the mark.

I had gone through lots of fun little scenarios of that person coming to my yard and mowing with a lopsided mower, maybe trimming my hedges leaving one end 3‘ tall and the opposite end 5’ tall. Maybe he would make my holly bushes look like bonsai trees and my weeping cherry tree might end up looking like a stalk of broccoli. I chuckled with the guys back at the office and as we chuckled they started joking about my email style being some mutation of camel case, lowercase and proper case format. By the end of our festival of jokes I realized that a little spelling error on a landscaping truck was no worse than the fact that I have intentionally discarded my attention to making properly formed prose. You read correctly, in most of my email messages I type in lowercase by choice. The problem comes when I accidentally inject a capital letter and the memo begins to look completely random. I typically am just more interested in blasting out a response/resolution to some sort of support issue then I am to spell checking and formatting that message properly. I will even admit that my personal preference is lower case typography, it just reads better for me.

If things weren’t already taking a turn on me I got hammered for my camel case convention in code. Although camel case is perfectly acceptable in code, and highly preferred in Java, I have noticed it becoming more prevalent around us and a recent article Against Camel Case in the NY Times got plopped on my desk (actually the link was sent over IM… but that doesn’t really matter). I don’t really agree with Caleb Crain’s article completely, but it is an interesting overview of written language ascent and decline over the years. At some point in the day I surmised just typing camel case paragraphs, just forget the spaces! No, that just wouldn’t do.

So here we come to a point of convergence where my personal bias and my external sensors came together in a clash. I’m not as concerned about what is right and what is wrong here since it is painfully obvious that “design” is not spelled “desingn”. I don’t even feel guilty about making my emails a total hack riddled with a mixture of proper case, lower case, and wrong case since most of my email is just a quick cluster of letters intended to relay a disposable message (when it matters I do format by some loose rules).

Circle back around with me to the original statement around the error on that moving wall pictured above. I expect people who are poking advertising messages in front of my car to at least make sure the spelling is correct. I expect the people who fix my house after a flood to do a great job repairing my home and make sure they clean up the mess they make. I expect the dealership that changes my oil to make sure there are no greasy smudges on my paint or upholstry. I expect people who install upgrades to my home to make sure gaps are all filled and incidental repair needs to be brought to my attention so we can work on getting them fixed. I expect a company project manager to come out and look at the bad paint job I told him about just as he promised.

Since I’m a coder my strong expectations naturally extend into my professional life where I am forced to constantly analyze, re-analyze and manipulate programs into the very best I can make them. I’m often jokingly accused of building space shuttles, to which I respond “with flames”. Although I resent anyone telling me to “dumb down” my code, I do realize there is a delicate balance I must make between a program’s purpose, time to market, life expectancy and support team skill. Regardless of corporate culture I expect myself to code better today than I did yesterday (thanks for the quote Andy). I expect myself to expect no more from others than I do from myself. I expect myself to accept critical commentary as a growing opportunity. I expect my company to allow me to use my legacy and blossoming skills to constantly help move the company forward.

In the spirit of Capital One commercial slogan “What’s in your wallet?” …

What’s in your expectations?