The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

level 2 of that game, tho':

"Is the list I made to know what to take pictures of complete? Did I really take pictures of everything? What about that thing I'm not remembering right now and wasn't on the list but I'm pretty sure I didn't turn it off, either ..."

It's totally related. There's the old urban myth about the "NASA Pen,"[0] which is a favorite of tech people (It isn't actually true, but it's a great story).

I have a similar apocryphal story that I use in design. I write about it here[1].

> For many years, I have heard stories about some architect – they never say who – that once designed an office park/university campus/government center, etc., and deliberately did not add any paved walkways. Instead, it is said he had the buildings completely surrounded by lawns. After a year, he came back, and paved the areas of these lawns worn thin by people taking the most effective routes around the buildings. He did this because he decided at the start of the project, he’d never be able to account for human nature, and it was his goal to serve the folks using the campus as best as he could. The users of his system would let him know, organically, how to “tune” it so it can best serve them.

Also, anyone that is familiar with the Granny Weatherwax character, by Sir Terry Pratchett, may remember that she practiced what was termed "Headology." That was sort of "practical" psychology, and it involved things like giving headless ghosts pumpkins, so they would stop moaning (actually, it was another character that did that -from I Shall Wear Midnight[2], but it was definitely Granny's "Headology").

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

[2] https://www.studynovels.com/Page/Story?bookId=27327&pageNo=6...

I remember a panel on a news program years ago where the one guest was a psychologist who was treating "untreatable" drug addicts by getting them "hooked" on running or weightlifting or martial arts. They would stop drugs but would instead be doing martial arts for hours a day or running 20 miles every morning. Then he would start treating the addiction personality and causes, but in many cases the patients would just stop coming and live three or more hours of every day in the gym.

The other guests were various degrees of horrified.

His patients went from literally living on the street as heroin addicts to doing 3 hour gym sessions and holding down a job; and his peers thought he shouldn't be allowed to practice.

Recently I was reading a book on ADHD and the author was quite adamant that you could only be diagnosed with ADHD if your life was worse than "the norm". In this view, if you have symptoms of ADHD but can, for instance, hold down a good job then by definition you don't have ADHD. I deleted the book from my Audible account.

A bit like a lightning rod. The OCD is going to fixate on something... give it a target you can control

I’m a big fan of these kinds of improvements. They can be a bit dangerous politically though. 5 minutes might be something the manager can get traction to implement a fix to get it below 1 minute build times. At 1 minute the manager may never be able to make a political argument to improve.

This may also be why the manager chastised the person fixing this. Such a drastic improvement can completely undermine any efforts to make even bigger fixes, as well as make the manager look foolish that they couldn’t make these improvements already.

I tend to believe the perfect is the enemy of good, but I’ve certainly worked in some orgs where I might take an improvement like this to the main champion of the problem first and ask if it’s a useful solution. I might even be willing to shelf the solution if I can be convinced it’s not in the long term best interest of the org. If I’m not, though, I’d likely become a champion of this short term pain relief knowing that things may not ever have much chance to get much better.