Anything is obvious when you already know it

More years ago than I would like to admit, I worked for a store in Sterling Virginia, in the outer DC suburbs.  This store had twin metal-framed glass doors, one of which was always locked and bore the sign "Please Use Other Door."  A significant percentage of customers would try to push the locked door open.  We clerks found this very amusing.



One day while we were expressing our amusement, another customer came up and politely set us straight.  He pointed out that there were over a dozen notices on the doors.  As far as he was concerned, there was nothing special about the "Please Use Other Door" sign, it was just one of many pieces of visual clutter on the door.  The mistake was ours in using the doors as a bulletin board; most people consider a door something to go through and not something to stop and read in detail.

This has stuck with me for over 30 years because you can draw so much from it. It was a good prelude to reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

First, as the title of this post says, anything is obvious when you already know it. But it's not fair to expect people who don't already know it to consider it obvious.  Think about this the next time you deal with a petty bureaucrat who expects you to be familiar with some arcane and arbitrary regulation.

Second, use something for its primary purpose.  Using the door as a bulletin board made it less useful as a door.

Third, less is more.  To make something obvious, take away other things.  When we removed the clutter from the doors, people mostly quit using the wrong door.


Fourth, don't be a jerk.  If someone ran into a door, it was an honest mistake caused by our violations of these rules.  Laughing at them was not appropriate.

Fifth, when you see someone being a jerk, don't be one yourself.  The non-confrontational way that the customer pointed out the error in our reasoning drove the lesson home.

He had my back

Father-son relationships are fraught but Dad and I got along pretty well, at least once I reached the age where your parents start getting smarter.  I knew that he always had my back and I relied on that more than I realized.  Even though he long ago ceased being the enforcer/protector, he understood the world well (especially organizations) and gave good advice.  Most of all, he cared.

I expected grief and loss when he died.  What I didn't expect was how naked my back suddenly felt, like the cold breeze on my face when I shave my beard off in the spring.

Irony

Shortly after the preceding post,  The one time my father was right, my father entered his final illness. He died in late May. 


The title of the previous post was a bit misleading. The point of the post was that this was the one time that something he said penetrated my teenage know-it-all defensive shield.  I figure that my relatively sparing use of salt over the last 30-plus years is why I don't have blood pressure problems in spite of being middle-aged, overweight and overstressed.

Dad was right about a lot of things and I wish I had listened more earlier.

The one time my father was right

During my middle teens, the family sat down to dinner. I reached for the salt before taking my first bite.  My father commented that this made little sense, how could I know that the food needed salting before I even tasted it?  I stopped and thought about it and realized that even though he was my father, he was right: it didn't make sense.

Since then I have rarely salted food.  I have found that salt is one of those things where the more you use, the more you need.  If you use it sparingly then it has more effect when you do use it.  If something tastes dull then a little bit of salt can make the flavors pop.

I believe that this is the only time I listened to my father when I was a teenager.

Sleep is an opinion

An up-and-coming young composer wrote a piece of music and asked an established older composer to attend a rehearsal and comment on the piece.  During the rehearsal the older composer fell asleep.  The younger composer was mortified: "How could you fall asleep when you knew that I wanted your opinion?"  The older composer replied, "Young man, sleep is an opinion."

This story is variously told of composers, playwrights, poets, etc, sometimes with no names and sometimes with luminaries such as Carl Sandburg and Mark Twain as the older party.  This is how I heard it.

The point of this story is that I will comment on creative works that I didn't finish, or where I skipped or skimmed parts.  That's a legitimate part of the opinion as long as I disclose it.

A perfect example of shortsightedness

I was riding my bicycle down 3rd Ave NW one day.  As Seattle goes this isn't a hilly street, about a 5% grade, but it's enough of a downhill that I had no trouble keeping up with traffic.  There was a motorist behind me who was clearly annoyed at being behind a cyclist.  As soon as it was safe, I moved over to the side so that he could pass.  He hit the gas and zoomed around me.  Then he immediately slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of me.  The car which was preventing me from going faster.

What kind of person can't see past a bicycle to see a car in front of it?  This was a sunny day (one of the half-dozen we get yearly in Seattle) and the car was clearly visible.  Talk about not being able to see past the end of your nose!

Introduction

In today's world, there is never enough time to get things right.  Get them good enough and then iterate as needed.  This blog is practice in letting things go even if they don't feel finished, without making that last polish that winds up taking twice as long and loses track of the original point.  Posts are timeboxed to that end.  Should be interesting for me, even if not for anybody else.  And we're off!