Technology & MSG

A Paranoid Boy Scout’s Story of a Leak

Jun 19th, 2007 by Alex

I was reading the March 2007 issue of Men’s Health today while sweating to death on one of the cardio machines at the gym. Not a bad magazine to read at the gym. It always seems to explain a few new ways to flex this muscle or tone that muscle, always an exercise that I’ve never heard of. The recipes aren’t too bad either. I was reading an article about business (which has nothing to do with my health), and in it was a choice quotation from Gil Schwartz:

“The paranoid mind is very organized and very tactical. In business, that’s pure gold.”

I make a conscious effort not to write about my work. I work hard and at the end of the day I like to unwind. Writing usually relaxes me, but I don’t think that writing about my workday would help me in that department. Today is an exception, after reading that quote. It really struck a chord.

It isn’t just gold in business, really. The Boy Scout motto is “be prepared,” but I think the paranoid mind takes it a bit farther. It should be “be prepared for the unlikely.” I like engineers to be a little paranoid. When planning out systems it insures that there’s a backup to the backup to the backup, no matter how unlikely it may seem. Systems are funny like that, requiring as much redundancy as they do.

I had a situation at work where a widget failed. The widget is responsible for controlling the flow into a container. The container filled up and overflowed into a backup container that was designed precisely for this occurence. Bless the engineers for that one. The backup container then filled up and overflowed into a last resort container that was also designed precisely for this occurence. Again, a brilliant idea from the engineers. The last resort container is supposed to be configured in such a way that if it gets saturated it just gets rid of the excess in a clean and efficient way. So no matter what happens, you aren’t overflowing uncontrollably. If the last resort contained were configured correctly, that is…

All of that beautiful engineering gone to waste. Layer upon layer of redundacy all gone kaput because the very last portion wasn’t properly configured.

Despite knowing about all of this redundancy, a paranoid boy scout would keep a few buckets and some plastic tubing on hand. Just in case.

I’m horrible with metaphors. Then again I’m not a Boy Scout either.