01 September 2007

The Cutting of Corners

Never, ever take shortcuts about anything. Ever.

It will always come back to bite you. If not right away, then later on when you are least inclined to be bitten. If not you, then someone else. You don't want it to bite someone else, anymore than you want someone else's shortcuts to bite you. Do not do unto others what you would not want done unto to you.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We have a saying here that says "Genvägar äro senvägar." In english it means "Shortcuts are detours."

But sometimes it is the right way.

MWT said...

A detour isn't a shortcut. It's an alternate route. I'm talking about things like not properly documenting one's code and then needing to know what it does six months later. Or not bothering to process all of the data because it wasn't needed right then, and then needing to do the whole process again later for the other parts, when it would've been better to do the whole process once for everything. Or not figuring out how to store four digits for the year, because it would be decades before it became year 2000 and it would be important - and then having Y2K emergency recoding of lots of things.

Or in my case last night, not moving the shopping cart back to the cart corral because it was raining, and losing my sideview mirror in a collision with it.

Megadeus said...

Ooh. Ouch.

Before I read the comments, I was thinking, "must be SQL," but the car thing sucks.

If possible, find a junk yard that lets you scavenge parts and try to find a replacement in the event repairs aren't possible.

MWT said...

Heh, believe me, I'm planning to document the crap out of everything I do with the new database.

The mirror is just the mirror itself. Somehow it got knocked off. The rest of the thing that was holding it is okay, as far as I can tell. I'm planning to call up my insurance company and see if I can get them to cover it under "comprehensive."