Dieter - The Power of Words
Bound by a joke, freed by love
It was in Germany,
in the blossoming era of personal computers,
when data visualization and graphics
were still fragile seeds.
We supervised research at the university,
visited for seminars and demonstrations,
and I - young, restless,
smoking, drinking beer,
living too many hours at the keyboard.
Dieter was a sponge,
absorbing knowledge at impossible speed.
We stayed late in the lab,
shared dinners,
and one night he asked:
“What does a real programmer look like?”
I repeated a joke I had once heard:
“He knows more, smokes, and drinks beer.”
Two years passed.
When I returned,
Dieter was in graduate school -
smoking, loving beer,
living the words I had spoken.
But I no longer smoked.
He asked, astonished:
“Why did you quit? Are you still a programmer?”
I told him:
I had fallen in love.
She asked me to stop.
And so I did.
I had tried before,
failed countless times,
but when she spoke,
the dependency vanished -
as if erased by a spell.
No craving, no struggle,
only silence where the habit had lived.
That is the power of words.
And ironically,
I had once started smoking
because I was told the same thing
by an icon in the computer world.
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