Forkers

A forker is someone who unnecessarily forks a conversation or otherwise throws a kind of fork in the road. Forking is annoying and wasteful because it causes makework to be performed and imposes an additional burden of energy expenditure and brain gymnastics upon the victim of the forking. And it wastes time as well. Here's an example of a conversation in which a smart person named Joe encounters a forker named Bob. Put your self in Joe's shoes as you read it, and I think you'll understand.

Joe: I'd like a cheeseburger to go, and that's it. Nothing else.
Bob: Ok. Would you like fries with that?
Joe: No. Just a cheeseburger.
Bob: Do you want onions on the cheeseburger?
Joe. I don't know. I don't care about onions either way. Whatever it is by default.
Bob: Ok. But onions will cost you extra. They're not on the burger by default. So are you really sure you want onions on it?
Joe: I never said to put onions on it. I said I didn't care. Just do whatever it is by default.
Bob: Onions it is. Will there be anything else?
Joe: I said that in the very first statement I made to you. It hasn't changed since.
Bob: Sheesh! Sorry for asking. Don't be so prickly......Oh, and will that be for here or to go?
Joe: Nevermind. Cancel it. I'm leaving. *walks off*
Bob: (to himself) What a crazy customer.

That's an example of a bit of an extreme case but I think it illustrates the idea. Poor Joe has a brain and clearly said what he wanted at the very beginning, and idiot Bob, for whatever reason, kept unnecessarily forking and extending the conversation much longer than needed, wasting both of their time.

As a counter-example, let me replay the encounter above but this time replace Bob with a smarter, non-forking colleague.

Joe: I'd like a cheeseburger to go, and that's it. Nothing else.
Steve: One cheeseburger to go, that's it. The total is $1.57.
Joe hands him the money.

Do you see how much smarter and more efficient that was, for everybody involved? Joe wins. Steve wins. The burger restaurant wins. The economy wins. Civilization wins. Both Joe and Steve have more time and energy to deal with other things in life, and are also less stressed after the encounter. And I believe by engaging in an intelligent, efficient exchange it reinforces in both their brains the execution of that behavior and so it's more likely to happen in the future, as well. An ideal situation. The key difference is that a forker was replaced with a non-forker. To be fair, I don't know for sure that Bob was an idiot, it may just have been that he had some inane company rules or "customer interface script" he was required to follow, and that was the cause of his seemingly inane questions and cluelessness. Or perhaps the background noise level was too loud and he didn't hear Joe's statement. (But if that was true, Bob should have immediately told Joe, and Joe could have repeated it once, and no subsequent forking would have been justified.) If so, that sucks for him. But regardless, it was forking, and it's bad, and makes the world a worse place, so he should have not done it. I wanted to specifically point this out because this article isn't about saying "dumb is bad", which is rather obvious, but that forking is bad. And forking might be caused by seemingly smart (or at least, non-idiotic) people and processes.

Here's an example of forking that didn't involve a Bob-type person.

Joe is driving along a road one day.
Up ahead he sees that the road he's on forks into two distinct paths, one to the left and one to the right, though they both continue heading generally in the same direction as before (north, in this case). He's forced to choose which path to take, so as not to run off the road entirely. He quickly chooses the right path. (Ha.) As he drives along the right path, he glances off to his left to try to see exactly what it was that necessitated having the fork in the road. He sees no reason for it. There's just a path of empty ground in between the two forked routes. Eventually, both forked routes converge back together again.

Why would every driver be forced to choose which fork to take in the above example? What purpose did it serve? There didn't seem to be any. All the "designers" of that road have caused is a lot more time/energy/thought to be spent by drivers (maybe only a little per driver, but multiply it by millions of drivers on that road segment each year!), and probably have also introduced a new source of accidents that would not have existed otherwise. Therefore, this fork is stupid.

Forking can happen in everyday, casual conversation between people as well. It's not limited to situations where one person is a prisoner of some business process or rulebook. That said, there are probably exceptional cases where forking is not entirely bad. Where forking may have a beneficial side effect which offsets it's inherent negative aspect. For example, imagine a hostage situation where a police negotiator is talking to a kidnapper and wants to stretch out the conversation as long as possible, to help keep the kidnapper cool, thinking, and somewhat under control, possibly while a SWAT team moves in behind the building to launch a surprise assault. In that case, it would be smart for the negotiator to fork as much as possible, to draw out the conversation. The good outweighs the bad. But this is an exceptional case, not the norm. As a rule, don't do it.

Don't be a forker.