workaday Wednesday

Ooh, I sure was getting riled up yesterday! Our technology at work isn’t perfect, which is often frustrating but also understandable, if you start with the basic foundation that things generally aren’t.

So I figure the problem-solving steps work for tech as well as anything else. Once you’ve tried ignoring it to see if it goes away, and of course the classic ‘turn it off and turn it back on,’ it’s time for three Very Important Questions.

1. What are the likely outcomes of working to investigate and resolve this problem, and are they worse than the problem itself? (almost always yes)

2. Is the time and effort I’ll need to put into investigation and resolution of this problem worth the likely outcomes? (almost always no)

3. Is there a work-around I can put in place to reach a desired outcome that better aligns the level of effort put into resolution with the severity of the problem itself?
(They really should not have put me in charge of training, because I’m always telling people things like “use your own judgement” and “the manual says this but I always do this other thing because reasons,” which is excellent life advice but probably not quite in line with the corporate expectation.)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.