Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 16:37:48 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: nate@sri.MT.net (Nate Williams) Cc: terry@lambert.org, chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: The lawn-mower story Message-ID: <199606072337.QAA04502@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199606072253.QAA01145@rocky.sri.MT.net> from "Nate Williams" at Jun 7, 96 04:53:56 pm
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> However, I'm a lazy guy today and I don't finish my end of the bargain, > and I only mow half of the lawn, then I put my mower away to go watch > the NBA finals. My wife isn't much of a basketball fan, so she decides > to go out and do the trimming. Being the nice person she is (she > married me, so she has *lots* of those sorts of qualities to put up with > me) she doesn't say anything, but does her trimming as best as she can. > > Now, the lawn looks like crap because I didn't finish my job, but at > least my wife did the best she could do from her end. And, I admit that > it's my fault the lawn is ugly (ie; broken). Your wife did the best job she could under the circumstances; but by definition, "where you need to trim" is defined as "where the mower can't go". So your wife either had to work harder to guess where the mower could go without having "mower trails", or she had to delay her work until there were sufficient "mower trails" for her to do her job correctly. So she either had more work because you didn't do you job, or she had to delay her work because you didn't do your job. Now your neighbor, being a good engineer, proposed a soloution to your crappy looking lawn: don't let people look at the lawn unless it has been mowed. He claims that since the aim is to minimize work, that your wife shouldn't have to guess where the "mower trails" will be before they are there (unless of course, she's working off excess energy that would otherwise go into yelling at you for not mowing the lawn like you were supposed to). He also suggests that as part of your commitment to the partnership, that you either mow the lawn in its entirety, or you don't mow it at all, to save your wife the frustration of not knowing that, once you have started mowing, you will have finished mowing in a reasonable period of time. This is a policy, and he knows that you can subvert the policy by mowing the lawn in the places your wife looks to see if it's been mowed (out the kitchen window in back and the livingroom window in front), your mutual semaphores. So, you can still get your wife clipping without "mower trails" when she gets to the side yard near the roses, but since you might as well leave the mower running when you go from the front to the back, you will have to intentionally go out of your way to get your wife out there doing unnecessary work. As a protocol to implement the policy, you warrant the interaction by saying "you can look out the front and back doors to determine if it's time to clip, because I promise to do the side before the back". Now your wife can decide for herself when it is OK to clip the lawn without worring about needing to do extra work, and you can stop for the NBA finals without worring about needing to sleep on the couch that night. At the same time, the neighbor suggests that you mowing, and your wife clipping, aren't the only possible conflicts regarding the use of tools the lawn, and that the lawn is used for reasons other than applying tools to it. He says that he has another protocol to implement you and your wife's mutual policy of keeping "Binky", your cocker-spaniel, alive and whole. He suggests that you lock the dog-door so that it doesn't accidently let out the cocker-spaniel, who, like all cocker-spaniels, is so happy to see you that not only does he lose bladder control (as usual for the species), he gets sucked into the mower. By the same token, he suggests that your wife locks the dog-door while clipping so the cocker-spaniel, in a fit of happiness, doesn't poke his eye out on her clippers. This is a protocol, and he admits that since you don't actually *have* to lock the dog-door for the mower to start or the safety catch to come off the clippers, it will take a commitment on your part and your wife's part to keep the happy cocker-spaniels of the world happy (even if it does nothing for their bladder control). Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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