Comprehensibility – a teacher’s job

Explaining complicated matters in an understandable way is my speciality. Because I always want to understand things myself.

I just love jobs where complexity is a challenge.

This is in parts due to the fact that I’m a teacher both by deepest vocation and professional training. The harder to understand a product is, the more is comprehension restricted to the people who actually make it: the designers and engineers, the programmers and techies. They alone know what the product can do and how you can make it do it; they alone see the beauty of its workings. But they usually never talk about it to anyone but among themselves; so they find it hard to explain to us ordinary people.

I absolutely indulge in sitting down with the product people, pestering them for explanations about, say, a certain software solution or exotic complication of a mechanical watch movement, until I get it myself. And then I start breaking it down to digestible pieces for people such as my mum to understand.