Avoiding Guantanamo Bay — Challenges In Tech

Are You a Ticket Taker or Problem Solver

Leo Godin
6 min readMar 12, 2024

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Photo by Kevin Jarrett on Unsplash

We’ve all seen it in an old movie. Man in a uniform walking down the train aisle. “Ticket please.” Or maybe the movie is in New York, “Give me your ticket.” A mindless drone without a care in the world. He doesn’t notice the kidnapped girl or the men with guns or the ticking bomb right under is nose. He only cares about the tickets. But the cop — the one just days from retirement. The one who’s “getting too old for this shit.” He’s not a ticket taker.

That cop working out his last days, dreaming of pina coladas on the beach, he still cares. He looks for problems. He notices something is wrong. Cut to the next scene. There’s probably gun fire and a fist fight on top of the train. Our hero has saved the day, but bigger problems arise. That bomb was just the beginning of a grand conspiracy.

The ticket taker moves on like nothing ever happened, while the cop takes on bigger and bigger challenges, until the mayor is arrested and his young, brash partner gets the girl. There’s always a young, brash partner who gets the girl, right? the city is safe. For now….

Let me ask you something. Are you the ticket taker in this story or are you a problem solver like…

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Leo Godin
Leo Godin

Written by Leo Godin

I’m Leo and I love data! Recovering mansplainer, currently working as a lead data engineer at New Relic. BS in computer science and a MS in data