Gender of Inanimate Objects

I classify the books I read into three categories 1) Books for Work 2) Fiction Bestsellers and 3) Trashy Romance Novels. The last is truthfully a guilty pleasure that I try to justify by explaining that my mom read them and so I am just keeping that memory of her alive.

Regardless of category I typically read books extremely fast. The only books that have slowed my normal reading pace down were my college textbooks. I simply never found a way to quickly read 100 pages on business accounting.

Reading for me is a way to escape. Using my imagination I can immerse myself in another world and get away for a few minutes or hours whenever I need it.

Since I read so many books each year and have a horrible memory I often forget the titles and authors I have read. There is one book for which this isn’t the case.

In the book “Me Talk Pretty One Day” author David Sedaris talks about his struggle with learning a foreign language. As a student of the Russian language I easily identified with him. In some foreign language all nouns have a gender. In the case of Sedaris he was learning French. In French a window may be male and a door female. This distinction comes into play when setting up your sentence structure, conjugating verbs, etc. The same is true in Russian; nouns have a gender.

Its odd to think of an inanimate object as having a gender but this week I put the concept to work. Most days at work I interact in some form or fashion with either Microsoft Excel or DII GRETL. The second is an internal system used for forecast modeling.

Earlier this week my references started easily enough. I asked a colleague. “Can you tell me when GRETL is done running? I need her output for my file.” From that simple question GRETL has begun to develop a personality. I even referenced her in a meeting and someone asked me. “So is GRETL something like the computer from the movie ‘War Games’?”

As for Excel I have determined that the instance I have installed on my computer is definitely male in gender. I try not to foster stereotypes but I couldn’t help it in this case. The thing is many times this week I have had to force Excel to quit after asking it to do multiple things at once. It’s as if Excel is in the driver’s seat of the car and instead of asking for directions opts to simply pull off the road, stop and declare, “Yep, this is exactly where I meant for us to go!”

Today the image of GRETL as a woman and Excel as a male become even more real as I started to compare them to people in real life. For me I see GRETL as this shorter, fireball of an Italian woman. A woman who won’t be easily fooled and isn’t afraid to ask the tough questions or stand her ground. I’m still working on what type of real-life person Excel would be equal to…Perhaps an eccentric old man with a bowtie.