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Twenty-five Signs of a Completely Americanized Russian Programmer

Translated from Russian by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov

  1. Your English is still broken but you occasionally use the articles "a" and "the" in front of nouns
     
  2. Teaching your American co-workers dirty words in  Russian is no longer fun.
     
  3. You now prefer technical books in English to their Russian  translations, but you've stopped buying books and seldom open the ones you have.
     
  4. You can throw out technical magazines you are subscribed to without reading them.  Can throw out 90% of your mail without opening it.
     
  5. You have at least twice more computers at home that there are members of your family, but some were not switched on for several months.
     
  6. You occasionally buy paper for your home printer in Staples instead of bringing it from work.
     
  7. Can no longer consider the division of the country on Republicans and Democrats as a communist-style circus for rednecks and start to distinguish Democratic party platform from the Republican platform. Some even start to have their own preference in presidential elections. Few develop allergy to Fox News. While you still regularly read Inosmi.ru, you start verifying translation by finding original articles via Google. And start to realize that NYT Russia coverage is fully controlled by State Department.
     
  8. When you ask your child a question in Russian you are not surprised that he/she answers you in English.
     
  9. You order a double deck hamburger and diet Coca-Cola.
     
  10. More often speak with children using cell phone than in person.  If relaxing after work you sit on your lawn you are not surprised if wife or child calls your cell phone from the house.
     
  11. You judge the size of the house by the number of bedrooms in it. 
     
  12. You know your social security number by heart
     
  13. Are not surprised that your neighbors complain to the police about loud music in your house.
     
  14. Can explain the rules of  baseball. 
     
  15. Forget how to open the hood of your car;  do not wash your car and disregard the shopping cart dents in your rear bumper for several months.
     
  16. Write into email conferences  more frequently than you phone your relatives.
     
  17. Are not shocked that you own your bank a six-figure sum for your house.
     
  18. Coming from work or a trip to the mall judge who of family members are at home by looking at the cars in the parking lot.
     
  19. Use "parking", "appointment", "OK", "shopping", "insurance", "lunch", etc  as Russian words.
     
  20. Respect the opinion of people who think that food in Burger King is different (and better) than in MacDonald's. Regularly order iced tea in winter.
     
  21. Buy fat-free food right after you've driven an additional 5 minutes around the parking lot to find a parking place three yards closer to the shop entrance.
     
  22. You now know that 90 degrees Fahrenheit is hot and 30 degrees is cold and stop thinking about people who use Fahrenheit instead of Celcius and miles instead of kilometers as backward and clueless...
     
  23. Not surprised that speed is measured in miles and square footage in feet. Able to explain directions using American measures of distance and do not think about them as anachronisms.  When stopped by police office for speeding you do not try to fool him by pretending that you are used to measuring speed in kilometers per hours and mixed then with miles per hour.
     
  24. Can' t turn on your TV if your remote control is lost.  Periodically when you came home try to open the door of your house with car remote and are surprised that it does not work.
     
  25. Know what 401K means and notice that the value of S&P500 index can influence your mood.  Unfortunately, you also no longer think that stocks are for suckers who want to lose money or for Wall Street sharks who feed on 401K suckers...
     

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Created June 1, 1998; Last modified: March 12, 2019