Day 69 - Picking Out Potatoes

Potatoes image by lisibo, via Flickr

I learned another lesson from Mom that I use every single day of my life - both at work and at home. That's why this one deserves individual attention. And I learned this one before the age of 12 when we still lived in 307, before the move across the street to 312. It is a slight variation on the cleaning up spilled milk lesson.

I don't know that Mom set out to teach me anything that day. She needed help getting dinner ready. She gave me a potato and asked me to go downstairs and find five more about the same size.  With four kids in the family, we ate a lot of potatoes so Dad bought them at a potato farm in 50-pound bags, kept in the basement. I went down to the bag and pulled out five more potatoes, but I didn't settle for the little size of the one Mom gave me. I picked up five much larger potatoes and thought Mom would be pleased.

She wasn't.

She wanted six potatoes about the same size because she planned to bake them. If the potatoes were larger, they would take longer. If they weren't all the same size, they wouldn't be done at the same time.

I don't recall if Mom sent me back down for potatoes the right size or if she went down herself. No matter. The message stuck.

But I needed a reminder. While I was in college, I worked at my church in the office for one summer. During that summer, something went wrong with the transportation of the kids home from camp. Pastor  told me to prepare a letter to all the parents and send it right away. I prepared the letter, but I didn't see any point in sending it because it wouldn't arrive in time for the parents to get the message. Besides, I knew that all the parents were being called with the same message. So I didn't bring the letters to the post office. The next day, Pastor saw the stack of envelopes on my desk and asked me why I hadn't mailed them. I said it would be a waste of money because the letters wouldn't arrive in time. He looked at me and told me that sometimes it was important to take an action even if some other factor would interfere. In this case, he wanted the parents to know that we took every step possible to let them know about the problem. Instead, I hadn't mailed the letters. And that meant it was likely that some parents would complain that we hadn't told them. Answering machines were a thing of the future so parents who weren't home when the phone call was made would have good reason to think we hadn't informed them.

Once again, I realized that knowing the reason for the instruction would have been helped me avoid making an error in judgment. Now the lesson was firmly planted.

When my first husband Don and I arrived in Berkeley several years later, I again went to work for a church. Whenever my boss, Pastor Walt, told me to do something, I asked him "Why?" One day he commented that my generation seemed obsessed with knowing the answer to "Why?" I think he thought the question implied "Why should I do what you tell me to do?" when what I meant was "What are you hoping to accomplish if I do it that way?" With that explanation, he seemed satisfied.

How do I use this lesson these days? At work, nearly every day someone comes to me to ask me for "a SharePoint site." SharePoint is a web-based platform that can serve as a content management system (think libraries online), a content delivery system (think website), a workflow processing system (think applications, such as automated data processing for calculating and delivering payroll), or a collaboration zone (think wikis, blogs, discussion boards, or even Facebook). So "a SharePoint site" can mean any number of different things. So you see why my first question in response is some variation of "Why?" Sometimes what my customer needs is just a document library, not an entire site. But even if they need a site, I need to know what they will use it for, who will need to access it, what the relationship of the site is to already existing sites. Knowing why my customer thinks they need a SharePoint site is essential to providing them with what they need.  If I just gave them what they asked for, I wouldn't be helping them solve a problem or accomplish a goal.

At home these days, knowing the answer to "why?" is essential when I help Alex with his physical therapy for his repaired knee. The first day the physical therapist came to see Alex, he hadn't gotten a full answer to "why?" from Alex's surgeon, so he started Alex out with exercises at the usual pace, too aggressive for Alex. As soon as he heard from Alex's doctor's office, he called us back to tell us not to continue with the exercises until he came back the next day. Then he showed me not only what to do but explained why Alex's therapy needed to be more conservative. If he hadn't given me that explanation, if I only knew what to do, I could be pushing Alex to do too much. For one exercise, it is important for me to lift Alex's leg to be as straight as possible and then for him to pull my hand down to the bed. But if I lifted Alex's leg up from his hip, that would be too much extension. The action would look the same, but the method would put strain on the wrong muscles.

In the house, we have a canister lighting system in the kitchen. There are six canisters, but when we flip the switch, we never know how many will turn on. We usually get four, sometimes only three. And every now and then - but not often - we get all six. We wanted to know why. We called our home warranty company to request an electrician come to look at what we believed might be faulty electrical system. The electrician looked at the lights and explained that there are two reasons that one of them might not come on: either the transformer was not functioning or the thermostat sensed the light was too hot. He eliminated the first possibility because if there was a problem with the transformer, the lights wouldn't be intermittent - once off, they would remain off until the transformer is replaced. But the thermostat is designed to turn the lights off when they overheat. His conclusion was that the canister fixtures themselves are faulty, but the electrical system is fine.

Now we know. We don't have to worry about the lights. We can put up with them until we can't put up with them any more. It is important to know the answer to the question, "Why?".

Day 68 - Baking Banana Bread

Banana bread image by RobynAnderson, via Flickr

I made banana bread today. It reminded me of a number of lessons Mom gave me that she would probably have considered home economics lessons, but I consider them life or work lessons,

For example, Mom told me I should gather all the ingredients needed before beginning to bake or cook.  That way I wouldn't get half way through mixing the batter and discover I am missing an ingredient. I thought of that lesson the day I watched Judy make Rice Krispies® bars. She didn't gather all the ingredients together first. She just started with the first ingredient - butter - which she melted in the pan. Since the marshmallows were not out, there was no cue that they were needed, so she continued with the ingredient she did have out, the Rice Krispies.

Much of my work life I have managed projects, or been the primary interested party in someone else managing them - software development projects, access control projects, renovating an old building to turn it into an embassy projects, implementing the Department of State's student loan repayment program - and making sure I knew what all the pieces were and when they were going to be available was very important in each of those instances.

The next relevant lesson Mom taught me was never to break eggs directly into the batter. Instead, she taught me to break each egg into a cup first and then pour it into the batter. I thought it looked like an extra step, but she explained that sometimes eggs aren't fresh and if each egg was broken directly into the batter, a rotten egg would spoil the whole mixture. I don't think I have ever found a rotten egg, but I appreciated the scientific method approach to ensuring nothing invisible spoiled the batter when it was made visible. And identifying potential risks in order to mitigate them is a key step in any project management effort.

Mom also taught me that when I used one of the ingredients, I should put away the container it was in so that I would know when I was done that I had used everything. That's the lesson that was important for me today as I was mixing up the banana bread. When I was nearly done, I realized the butter was still on the counter. I had started out mistaking the first instruction - which called for a mixer - to involve the eggs. One of the eggs had a tiny crack so I was wondering it if was going to be my first experience with a bad egg. So that's what I put into the bowl first which I mixed until it it was a light golden color, just as the recipe said. Everything made sense next - I added the white sugar and the packed golden brown sugar and continued beating the ingredients.  I followed the recipe until I reached the point where there were just two bowls of ingredients left: the flour mixture that also had the salt, baking powder and baking soda, and the milk, to be added alternately. I was ready to add the first when I saw the butter on the counter.

But another lesson I learned from Mom is that there isn't just a single way to do anything. I could follow a recipe - or the instructions for a pattern - and I would come out with the desired result. But Mom also taught me that I didn't have to lay out pattern pieces on a piece of fabric the way the instructions showed; instead, I could fold the fabric to cut the pieces one at a time and end up with leftover fabric when I was done. Leftover fabric is good.

Likewise, there is no single way to mix banana bread batter. So I had forgotten the butter. I knew I couldn't leave it out, but all I had to do was put the butter into another bowl, turn on the mixer again, and then when the butter was a light golden color, I added it to the mixture. Voila! Banana bread batter was fixed.

A final lesson in this home economics series is the proper way to clean up spilled milk. My instinctive response to seeing spilled milk was to head for the lowest point, where the majority of the milk pooled, in order to clean that up. But Mom pointed out that it was more effective to start at the source, where the milk first hit something it wasn't intended to hit, like the kitchen counter or table surface. She told me that unless I cleaned up the milk at the source of the spill, I would never get everything cleaned up. Even worse, if I concentrated on the end point of the spill, I might not even be able to see the path the milk traveled to get there as the quantity eventually slowed to a trickle, almost evaporating from sight.

Mom's lesson for cleaning up spilled milk comes to me often at work. For example, when I worked as a software engineer, our testing team ran every new version through a series of tests and assigned a priority to any issues they uncovered. Priority 1 issues were those that caused the system to crash. Priority 5 issues were cosmetic. We addressed priority 1 issues first and sometimes made it to the priority 5 issues.  

One day I was ahead of schedule and I started on the priority 5 issues. One described extra spaces being added to the status message that scrolled across the upper right of the screen, depending on which floppy drive was selected. With drive A, the message was perfect. With drive B, one extra space was added. With drive C, two extra spaces were added. And so on. Extra spaces in the message were cosmetic, not meriting much time to address.

Except the reason for the extra spaces being added was found within the code that displayed the message, not the message itself. When I discovered this, I realized that if a user requested drive G, our priority 5 issue would become a priority 1 issue. We found the issue and corrected it.

That's cleaning up spilled milk from its source.

Because someone asked, here is the recipe for banana bread.

5 Tbsp butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 large egg
2 egg whites (if I have them, I use egg whites. If I don't have them, I use whole eggs.)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups mashed, very ripe bananas (I find 3 bananas is usually about right.)
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup heavy cream (I use milk)
1/3 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Spray bottom only of 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pan with non-stick cooking spray.
2. Beat butter in large bowl with an electric mixer set at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add granulated and brown sugar; beat well. Add egg, egg whites and vanilla; beat until well blended. Add mashed banana, and beat on high speed 30 seconds.
3. Combine flour, baking soda, salt, and baking powder in medium bowl. Add flour mixture to butter mixture alternately with cream with flour mixture. Add walnuts to batter; mix well.
4. Pour batter evenly into prepared loaf pan. Bake until browned and toothpick inserted near center comes out clean, about 1 hour 15 minutes.
5. Cool bread in pan on wire rack 10 minutes. Remove bread from pan; cool completely on wire rack. Slice and serve with butter and jam.