Originally Posted by
Adam Strange
I had a business partner who was probably the smartest guy I've ever known when it came to computer software and electronics, and he was totally scary in his complete lack of real human emotions. He had all the humanity of a crash test dummy but also had a strong need to be seen and admired.
After I asked him to partner with me, he built himself a huge house on a hill with great views of the surrounding land. He lived there with his wife and five kids and did the best work I've even seen on designing a real time operating system that ran on cutting edge TI DSP's. He designed the RTO system and the boards it ran on, and it all worked. It was world class, and he did it all himself. He was also able to spend every dollar and more that I was pouring into the company, and we eventually had to bring in an investor with even deeper pockets to support his spending.
But I was visiting him one day when his "favorite" daughter came into the building to say hi, and he acted as if she didn't exist. Not that he was ignoring her; she wasn't in the room making human sounds. No one was there, other than the two of us. It startled me like few other things have. His whole life was like a false-front imitation of a human life. He had a vast, howling wilderness where his human should have been.
Eventually, the business collapsed, he cheated on his wife with a stripper, his wife divorced him and took the kids, and he drank himself to death in his vast, empty house one winter.
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