Back when I was working on my (never completed) dissertation, I would sometimes call up televangelists’ hotlines and talk about my research. It was pretty amusing how they would initially try to steer the conversation to the God stuff but then give up as I kept relentlessly returning to my subject. Eventually they were reduced to “uh huh … uh huh” but they couldn’t just hang up on me because they weren’t allowed to. I actually worked through some problems this way.
Back when I was working on my (never completed) dissertation, I would sometimes call up televangelists’ hotlines and talk about my research. It was pretty amusing how they would initially try to steer the conversation to the God stuff but then give up as I kept relentlessly returning to my subject. Eventually they were reduced to “uh huh … uh huh” but they couldn’t just hang up on me because they weren’t allowed to. I actually worked through some problems this way.
In programming, this is called ‘Rubber Duck Debugging.’
The televangelists, in this case, were the rubber duck.