Jim Medding’s Blog

I had a coworker who had had a very bad day; kind of like my day a few years ago. I pointed her to my blog posting thinking it might cheer her up, but when I received “How horrible” as comment back from her, I realized that that it hadn’t.

I also realized that my original posting might not have quite caught as much of the retrospective humor that I was hoping for. And there were some very humorous moments. One of the things I didn’t put in the blog is that I had Greg call my wife to let her know what was going on. The conversation went something like this:

Greg: “Hi Mom, were down here by the overpass”
Cindy: “So, you’ll be home soon”
Greg: “No”
Cindy: “Why not?”
Greg: “The van’s on fire”
Cindy: “What?”
Greg: “The van’s on fire”

As a child, I believed there was no better food than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I could not imagine life without at least one sandwich every day. I remember this because, much to my shock, I discovered my best friend, Earl, could not eat them. He was allergic to peanut butter. I remember the conversation with Earl when he revealed this hideous fact; it was the first time in my life when I felt complete and utter disbelief.

Jim - “What?”
Earl - “I’m allergic to peanut butter.”
Jim - “But it’s really, I mean, really good.”
Earl - “I can’t eat it.”
Jim - “You need to go talk with your mom, that can’t be right.”
Earl - “It won’t do any good.”
Silence

To this day I still pity Earl for missing out on all of those PB&J sandwiches.

A few years ago, I had, shall we say, an unusual event occur. On a Saturday I was shuttling my sons and a couple of their friends to and from a local event in between doing my usual weekend projects. After dropping one of their friends at his home, I pointed the van towards our home. We were coming up the hill towards our house when all of a sudden things started to happen. Cars were honking their horns and my son, calmly, says “Dad, there’s smoke coming out of the vents.” I pulled the van over towards the curb, open the door and as I put my left foot on the ground, a Good Samaritan yells “There are flames coming out from under your van.” That’s about all I needed to know, bless his heart. I simultaneously turned the van off and told the boys to get out of the van and move away. Then I called 911. OK, your standard van fire, no big deal. The fire trucks show up and put the fire out; what’s so interesting about that?

Well, the interesting part, at least to me, is that as I was talking to the 911 operator, waiting for the fire truck to come, I watched traffic continue to squeeze by my van as it was spewing smoke and flames. At this point I realized that…Saturday’s are busy times and people are not going to be put out by the threat of death and destruction. Places to go; things to do; no time to wait for some rube’s silly van fire.

Senator Joe MacCarthy is reported to have said, about George Marshall, “If Marshall was merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve America’s interest.” I bring this quote up, not because I agree with the statement, but because I find it an interesting assertion concerning incompetency. The assertion is that an incompetent decision maker is not likely to “never get it right” where as a destructive decision maker is.

I was fresh out of college with no more than a few weeks of employment under my belt when a really weird guy called out to me from over my cubical wall, “Hey, I need blah, blah, blah.” I didn’t really catch what this guy, who I later learned was named Marvin, was asking, but my cubical mate, Tim, said he knew how to do this and would help me do it. Tim, having a couple more months of professional experience than I, had taken me under his wing to show me the ropes. Our days had been filled with equipping our desks with supplies and walking the halls of the facility. Even though I was a bit timid, Tim assured me that this was a task I could accomplish. He furnished me with a stack of forms and showed me how to fill them out using the information Marvin had supplied. When I completed the forms, I handed them back over the wall to Marvin and went home that evening feeling like I had earned my salary.

A few weeks later, a gentleman named Max walked into my cubical with a stack of, vaguely familiar, forms and asked me “What’s the reason for this change you’re making.”

I looked at Max with a blank expression.

Max insisted, “You have to have a reason for change.”

At this point I blurted out “I’m making a change?”

Max fidgeted with noticeable exasperation so I said I would figure it out and took the stack of forms back. After Max left, I began studying the forms. After a few trips to get copies of various drawings (all that walking around had paid off) and studying them intensely, I realized that I was, indeed, making a change. I was changing the dash numbers of a handful of capacitors used on each drawing and the only difference between the old capacitors and the new capacitors was their reliability rating. The new capacitors had a higher reliability rating. So in the Reason for Change block, I wrote “Higher reliability parts.” I was pleased with myself as I proudly presented the stack of forms back to Max. That was the last I ever saw of those forms.

Fourteen years later, after I had moved on to numerous other projects, Mike, who was still with my original project, approached me and asked me if I remembered a bunch of capacitors I had changed many years ago. Apparently, the higher reliability capacitors were no longer readily available. Because the Engineering Change Notice had specified that the reason for making the change was reliability, they had been unable to change the drawings back to the originally specified capacitors. In retrospect, if I had asked Marvin, using the time honored professional method of letting it roll down hill, what was his reason for making this change he would have said “Parts availability.” But if I had done this, Mike would never have been compelled to stop by and have a conversation with me. Mike’s wife and kids were doing fine.

Occasionally I read something that, well, explains so much. Such was the case when I read a Reuters story reported by Deborah Zabrenko in January, 2000. The gist of the story, reported in the first sentence, is that the “truly incompetent never know the depths of their incompetence.” This humbling revelation was the conclusion of a study conducted by, presumably, qualified social psychologist Justin Kruger and David Dunning. The underlying cause is explained as follows:

Incompetents lack the basic skills to evaluate their performance realistically. Once they attain those skills, they know where they stand, even if that is at the bottom.

True ineptitude, which I have seen firsthand, is not having the ability to attain a skill.

Given the difficulty I have finding a watch with the features I want, I have to conclude that I’m just not “with it.” It doesn’t matter what price range I look at, I just can’t find the ideal watch. It’s not as if I’m too demanding, every single feature I desire is available on the market. All of these features, however, are just not available in a single watch. So here’s the list, roughly in order of importance:

Actually, it’s the final feature on this list that is so difficult to find. To quote the Spanish channel soaps – “Por qué, Maria?”