Thousand lines of Java but one skipped semicolon. Hundred hours of construction but one forgotten cog. Ten minutes of meditation but one blink of the eye. All equal to a zeroing nothingness.
The need for this idiom was born when I chose to bury my stuttering instead of tackling it head-on. I got a compilation error years later as I tried to be a public speaker. Understanding the importance of resolving problems when we see them, big or small, I began my quest to check the validity of my idiom across different disciplines.
Just recently, in the desire to get the cars to the market quickly, a tiny unresolved airbag glitch was the reason for the death of numerous Toyota passengers, prompting a recall of six million vehicles in 2018. The grandest oil spill, Deepwater Horizon, could have been minimised had cement sufficiently been laid between the thin production casing. Even NASA, a hub of prodigious minds, lost a $125.4 million Mars orbiter not because of a miscalculation, but because of a miscommunication between English and standard metric units. These results, however, aren’t any different if we apply them to our personal lives. My gardener faces an ugly patch of vegetation if he ignores the presence of some weeds. If my cousin’s habit of pulling his hair is not checked, his trichotillomania could develop into a permanent personality disorder over time. And as a matter of fact, even in fiction, Dumbledore’s blind eye towards Tom Riddle’s infatuation with the dark arts led to his becoming of the Dark Lord.
The common thread here is that all of us yearn for results, outcomes, answers. Because that’s what matters -- the product, not the process; the story, not the struggle; the climax, not the content. But, in this route of coming to faster conclusions, we tend to disregard small problems that come our way.
Side effects, collateral damage, opportunity cost or limits of experimental inaccuracies, we conveniently name them. But it is these bugs, left unbridled, that swell into daunting instabilities, weaknesses and compilation errors over time.
Having said this, should we not yearn for efficiency? No, we absolutely should, but not at the cost of becoming complacent. When we see a bug, we shouldn’t try to bury it into the ground, in an attempt to conceal it. It’s best if we can pluck it right out by the root, but even accepting its presence and its potential negative impact is a good start at recovery.
Trying to be true to my words, when I see my co-founder Kush suggesting that just two negative customer feedbacks were not alarming enough for us to make a change in the UI of our startup SKIPH, I disagree or when I hear my basketball coach suggesting a minor change in my shooting action, I don't think twice before reflecting because I know ‘Even one bug leads to a compilation error.’
Comments