Love is the only game you are sure to lose by declining to play.
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The past two days, Daughter and Nugget have come over while I was on the porch with my post-breakfast cigarette. Daughter says Nugget sees me from the window, yells "Amma! Amma! Amma!" (Gramma!), jumps up and down and waves her arms and makes it clear she wants to come over. If the window's open, I hear her.
Daughter escorts her across the street, and Nugget is all smiles.
But I suspect it's not "Amma" she's so excited about.
I meet them on the porch in front of the door. I get a quick hug from the Nugget, and then she reaches toward the door, turning her wrist. She wants the door opened.
I suspect she's madly in love with my house.
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Another blogger (RockyCat) was recently distressed by a Craigslist ad she'd found, advertising kittens ready for adoption. The ad was full of typos and misspelled words. It was pitiful. Rocky was sickened by it. (Here.)
I didn't comment because I had to think about it a bit, and now my thoughts are too long for a comment.
Yeah, the failure of American schooling? But maybe English isn't her native language? On the other hand, if one makes the necessary spelling corrections, the ad was rather well composed with all the necessary information, which these days is something unexpected and to be admired.
My thoughts eventually led to Jay's perfectionism. He'd blow deadline after deadline making sure that some piece of code was perfect. He wasn't satisfied unless it was as tight as it could be, as small as it could be, as fast as it could be, as efficient as it could be, and still handle every possibility, even those never considered by the product design. He'd fiddle and fiddle. He wouldn't let go until it was absolutely perfect. And to do this, he'd blow his own deadlines, the deadlines of everyone down the line who depended on his piece, the product announce and delivery dates, and lose the market advantage. And then (pure Asperger) he didn't understand why everyone was mad at him. "It's perfect! I couldn't release something that wasn't perfect!"
I had to watch over him. I had to be aware of his target dates. And as they approached, I'd have to hold his hand, look him in the eye, and say, over and over, "Good enough is good enough. What are the written requirements? Does it meet requirements? Yes? Then it's good enough. Maybe it's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be. You can update it later. Good enough is good enough."
So, back to the Craigslist ad.
I hate to admit this, but it's good enough. The reader has no great difficulty understanding what it's saying, and it conveyed all the information. (I had a bit of difficulty with "they are verry qute", reading it first as "quiet" until "cute" dawned on me.) The reader isn't left with a lot of respect for the educational level of the writer, but that wasn't a requirement for an ad of this type.
In this case, it was good enough.
It hurts to say that.
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The writings that upset and scare me most the ones I can't read, or can't understand, because they're full of text-speak or acronyms or "urban-defined" words, or when the writer has chosen the wrong word (decimate/devastate)(problematic/a problem)(loan/lend)(lose/loose)(its/it's), or the wrong homonym (to/too)(site/sight), or something like incident/incidents/incidence, or horror of all horrors, incidences, which isn't even a word at all. The kind of thing that LOOKS like it should be read literally but creates the wrong picture in my mind when read literally, and I have to back up and attempt to figure out what they REALLY meant, which sometimes isn't possible. I mean, if we could read minds, why write at all?
Those are the errors that have me blowing stream, especially when made by "professional" writers.
(E.G. - I was reading a post about an acquaintance's hiking trip a few days ago, wherein he mentioned "a beautiful site" he'd seen. I stopped and frowned. I thought I'd missed the part where he'd said he was looking to purchase some real estate in the mountains. When I realized it was HIS error, I was pissed at him.)
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3 comments:
Ha, ~~Silk, whenever I write about stuff like this, I'm always terrified I'm gonna have some typos.
And I think a lot of the bad-spelling thing is Pure-D laziness. Why spell-check or proofread when you can just blat something out there? Personally, I would not answer a Craigslist ad that was so badly worded I had to prize out the meaning. I don't want to deal with dipshits.
And yeah, I read a book years ago, I think it was called "Quality is Free", about how if something meets design criteria, it's a "quality" product. Can't say as I agree with that, exactly.
Writing. I am aware that I am too wordy. I take much too many words to convey everything. TL;DR Even in speaking, I'm too wordy. People get impatient. I take ten words to say what could be said in four, and they roll their eyes.
I just don't want to be misunderstood. That's my criteria.
The best writers comb their compositions, deleting unnecessary words and explanations, selecting perhaps less common words, non-conversational words or more evocative words, that better convey mood and content. The result is tight and precise, and often beautiful. Done well, there is no misunderstanding. Perfection.
Me, I write the way I speak - and that's excessively wordy. I know it. I know it could be tighter and more precise if I took the time to trim it. But I don't want to take the time. I've implemented one measure of quality (clarity) at the expense of another (beauty).
And that's my point - Jay wanted technical perfection. He elevated esoteric technical quality over market timing. His product could be perfect, but it doesn't matter if the customer has moved on.
"Gets the job done" gets the job done. Good enough is good enough.
The key is in defining the design quality criteria. Some measures have to be sacrificed to other more important measures, otherwise nothing would EVER be finished. That's where many companies fail. They push the wrong criteria.
But "wrong" depends on your viewpoint.
IBM, for example, is perfectly content to ship bugs, as long as they're first to ship. It's easier to fix bugs once the product is in the customer's shop than to replace a competitor's product that's already installed, regardless of comparative product quality. Salesmen are happy with that. Designers, programmers, and testers are not, but the marketing division runs the company, so that's that.
Well, at least he managed to get started. I was frequently stuck in the "but it has to be perfect!" rut. Then I realized it couldn't be perfect. Sad to say, I just stopped trying. My own fault. C'est la vie.
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