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?".