“Bank failures are caused by depositors who don’t deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement”
Dan Quayle
More short takes
Snow day
When I was growing up in Minnesota we had winter, sometimes we had too much of it. If we received too much snow there would be a snow day and school was closed. Over a cup of coffee we were comparing winter stories when I found out there is something that trumps a snow day, a coal week. It seems that during the winters in Slovakia sometimes there would be problems in procuring the necessary heating coal due to temporary budget problems.
In those cases the school would be closed for a few days or a week.
The truth will set you free
You left the meeting early, why?
It was boring.
What did you do then?
Read some Android documentation.
Non-monetary opportunity costs
For instance, an individual could choose not to ask a girl out on a date, in an attempt to make her more interested (“playing hard to get”), but the opportunity cost could be that they get ignored – which could result in other opportunities being lost.
From wikipedia
I thought that they knew what they were doing …
Well, just because we are all working for the same company doesn’t mean unity, as a matter of fact, it is not any different from when I was in high school. There are different cliques and not everyone get along with others.
Yet when working in a very large company the situation can be a bit worse than that. Implementing new functions either as a project or on an existing process will bring a lot of people together for long periods of time who would not normally even spend the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. The problems occur when personalities start to act out. One such case was when rolling out new functionality due to a change in the local law.
It was learned later than some of the rules in our system that were required were not properly setup and activated and that this fact has been known for months. Rather than to be proactive and inform the other group about this apparent oversight nothing was done up to and including go live. It was later discovered that processes have been running with an improper setup and thus a lot of things may be missing in the future. This topic came up over lunch and indeed Bob knew that this was not setup for at least six months but comment was “well, I thought that they knew what they were doing”.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity
Unfortunately neither of these two options make Bob look very good.