>>>>I know their kids!
>>>>There's bug1, bug2, hiddenbug, nastybug, and our perinnial favorite: 'never-shows-itself-when-the-debugger-is-running' bug
>>>
>>>:)
>>>
>>>Not the case here. Beta is my wife's nickname (short for Elizabeta).
>>
>>Your the 'alpha' male, then? :)
>
>
>"Leader" is a four-letter word in Serbian... in both senses. We've just had enough of those... which introduces an iteresting thread drift here: even though it's a democracy here, there's so much accent put on leadership. Being raised in self-management socialism, we had the low-level democracy (even though it worked less and less as you moved higher), so any group of people, be it simply hikers, would not feel obliged to have a leader. This is very much in contrast with what I saw both here and back then in the USSR. Once in (then) Leningrad, where we were for a senior student trip, we were photographed in front of the Ermitazh, and the photographer asked "who's eldest?", which meant "who's the boss". We looked at each other and nobody felt the urge to be one. "Nobody". You should have seen the baffled look on that man's face. Then my roommate and I decided we'd volunteer to collect the money and distribute the pictures, and the guy was still shaking his head.
>
>Another example of this is when a Yugoslav airplane was hijacked in Greece. The passengers got self-organized within minutes, and faked a fire alarm (the plane was on the ground), confused the hijackers and set themselves free. The whole thing happened in less than 15 minutes. Picking an alpha out of the crowd, judging by Hollywood movies, would take at least 20 minutes of movie time, which could be hours of real time.
>
>I figure the image of a leader is deeply carved into a Western retina; you probably feel the group doesn't really exist as a coherent group without one. We don't really operate that way (or didn't - don't know about now, haven't found myself in a random group for quite a number of years), and basically anyone who tries to assert authority will just piss the others off. Come to think of it, I don't remember hearing the notion of the alpha male back home, except in some books... which, upon recollection, turned out to be by American authors :)


Interesting comments!

I have a very good friend who lives in Romania. We often exchange email and discuss life in our respective countries. His accounts of life before and after the fall of the USSR were eye openers. In a previous post you mentioned something that he did also... to find out what they thought about things the managers would always go to those above... There was always someone at the top who's mind wasn't made up by asking someone above. He was usually the one who "pulled the trigger" in more ways than one.