[Courses] [Spineful Living, lesson 3: 101 Satisfying Retorts For All Occassion]

[Valerie Henson]

On 4/13/07, Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> wrote:
> I'm bailing out of town for the weekend and don't have time to write an
> ordinary lesson, so how about everyone share their favorite comebacks and
> responses for those uncomfortable, annoying, enraging, and so forth
> occasions? Have fun and I'll see you Monday!

I'm on the pro-snappy comeback side.  You can really change someone's
opinions with a well thought out comment.  This isn't about making
someone feel bad, it's about giving them an "OH... Now I get it and I
will never ever forget it" moment.

The one I've had to practice the most goes like so:

Some guy at a conference asks, "Are you a developer?"  Or, "Are you
REALLY a developer?"  Occasionally followed by a suspicious look and
"Well, what did you write?"  Turns out "Yes!" is not a good enough
answer.  Here's the response that took me a few minutes of research on
Google and about an hour of practice:

"Yes, I'm a kernel developer.  I maintained a sub-architecture of
PowerPC, the tulip, yellowfin, and roadrunner network drivers, had
patches accepted to mainline in TCP/IP, ext2, and VFS, and was one of
the key designers of ZFS."

Although, after I wrote the Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf series for Linux
Weekly News, I get, "I really like your LWN articles," *scurry away in
fear* more often now. :)

This kind of comeback is closely related to your "elevator pitch" -
what you tell someone about yourself if you have only 60 seconds to
make an impression.  It's worth developing, even if you don't go to
conferences.

-VAL