Brute Force (Part 3): Bruce & Ellie

The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

 Thomas Edison

The book Thinking, Fast and Slow uses the analogy of the Type 1 and Type 2 ways of thinking with human characteristics: Type 1 is the fast thinking, intuitive, snap judgment guy and Type 2 is the slow thinking, logical, thorough kind of guy. But Type 2 is lazy and will prefer to put his feet up and let Type 1 take responsibility for decisions if it can get away with it.

In the same vein, meet Bruce Force and Eleanor Gent (Ellie to her friends).

Bruce is a stereotypical man’s man. He walks around in a lumberjack shirt or leather jacket with the collar up. He is, or at least likes to think he is, an Alpha male. He likes to take charge and order other people around. He thinks he knows the best way to do things and that best way is to get stuck in. Often he hasn’t the faintest idea. His house is full of DIY disasters where he just ploughed straight-in only to find a little later down the line he’s done it upside-down and back-to-front. The common occurrence of a failed IKEA construction is never his fault. Perhaps they’ve packed the wrong part. The very idea of consulting the instructions for Bruce is a laughable idea. He is persistent though. He is the very embodiment of Edison’s Stick-to-itiveness.

Ellie is altogether a different character. She wears thick milk bottle top glasses and a sensible bob haircut, which she cuts herself. She always has an eye for a bargain and can make, literally, pounds of savings by studiously buying what’s on offer at the supermarket and using vouchers and accrued Clubcard points. She prides herself on being prepared and always has a torch, spare batteries and a blanket in the boot of her economical car for when she goes camping, just in case. She is never one to rush in to a decision and hates being pressurised even when she’s deciding what to have on her Subways sandwich. Her home is an efficient, organised machine. She is never left looking for her car keys. And when she moves house everything is boxed-up and labeled for a smooth, alphabetised transition at the other end. She is not one for spontaneity and her social calendar is booked-up months in advance.

So Ellie and Bruce are two peas in very different pods. Neither always does things "the right way" but each have there moments of success and failure. Bruce is probably better on a night out but Ellie would be good to have around the next day to help make cups of tea.

But this isn't to say that Bruce and Ellie are always at odds. In fact, things can really get done when they work together. The Four Colour Problem is an example of when they worked as a team to solve a previously unsolvable problem. Ellie works-out some of the things that could be a possible solution and then Bruce charges-in, like a wound-up Duracell bunny, to try some of them out. Their skills can complement each other in cases like this. It's fair to say that a long-term relationship between the two is unrealistic though. Bruce’s sock draw would drive Ellie mad.