Deadlines. Bad project management. Bad combination. This is the time when you start to wonder why things don’t work the way they’re suppose to work, and a lot of the times, you realise that history finds its way to invade the present rather than stay in the past, just like our QWERTY keyboard.

So what happens when things don’t work? You start to enhance them, change them, but still based on the old paradigm, based on the existing infrastructure, until there comes a tipping point when you find that the existing infrastructure just can’t take any more patch jobs. It’s art when it’s a patched quilt. It’s torture when it’s a patched system.

Yet we still patch them, over and over again. Each additional patch will have to be remembered somehow because any new patch will need to take into account how the old patch work. Most of the times, to reduce time devising such a patch, we do a “copy and paste”, then add a few more lines of code to that. Then we estimate the time to do just that, and test the other systems so that this new code didn’t affect how the old ones work.

And here lies the thing that’s bothering me. If the system takes 5 man months to change, it takes 5 man months to change. If a process for a group of people takes 5 days, and you need it yesterday, it’s perfectly acceptable to expect this group of people to deliver it the next day.

Technology seems to have a higher status than humans. Technology can throw up their hands and say “I can’t do it in time” and we’ll accept such a thing. When humans do that, we are weak, not efficient, not effective, not productive, not loyal, not motivated, not… <fill in your own self-help jargon>.

Why have we been relegated to such a status? Why do we discriminate against our own kind? Why do we idolise technology instead?

I fear we may be less trusting than I’ve previously thought. We don’t trust the decision made by anyone else except ourselves. If someone said “it’s a 5-day job”, you would compare and see if it really takes 5 days. After a while, the level of distrust will escalate because if I say 5 day, you’d tell me to do it in a day, I’ll say 10 days so that you might discount it to 5. The distrust works both ways. If you don’t trust my estimate, I don’t trust your decision and I don’t give you a true estimate, and you will never trust my estimate etc…

How do we go round this conundrum? I think someone has to start. I’ve been known to trust people too easily, but sometimes, you just have to do it to see where it goes. Maybe later, I’ll be more cynical and pessimistic that I’ll start withdrawing myself into a clamshell. At least I’m moulding a pearl in it, to come out when my layers of defense have hardened.

A pearl can be bought and sold. Trust can’t. You just have to give to receive.