How to Umpire the Game

I once had someone explain to me that the way you could tell the difference between a young umpire, an experienced umpire and an old umpire was that the young umpire would say, “I call them as I see them.”  And the middle-aged umpire would say, “It’s not a ball or a strike until I say it’s a ball or a strike.”  And the old hand would say, “I make it a ball, or I make it a strike.”Dr. Dan Geer, fired CTO of @stake, Computerworld, 6 October, 2003