Essays, page 2
Occasional writing that belongs to no client and no company. Nothing here is about tax and nothing here is about marketing operations; those have their own homes and their own standards of proof. This is the other thing.
Page 2 of 3. Essays 25 to 48 of 51.
False precision
The format of a number is an assertion, and it is usually one I had not checked before publishing it.
Copy and paste was the first automation
Nothing in a duplicated file records where it came from, so an error does not just spread. It spreads into a structure that has forgotten how it was assembled.
A budget is a promise, not a forecast
The reason a missed budget feels like a betrayal rather than an error is that it is one.
Every tool teaches a different model
Whatever appears in all six systems belongs to the field. Whatever appears in one is a vendor's opinion delivered in the grammar of a rule.
Work someone else can run
You cannot sit the test while you are still in the building, which is why so much admired work fails it invisibly.
Kanata is two places
I correctly identified two Kanatas and then pointed a practice at the one that could not see me.
Two versions of the same agreement
Ambiguity survives comfortably in one language and dies the moment you have to say it twice.
Culture is a set of defaults
A default is invisible to whoever shares it and glaring to whoever does not, which is why culture is only ever visible from outside it.
The first customer
One payment is a real fact about the world and a much smaller one than it feels like on the day.
The calendar is a moral document
Whatever anyone says they value, the schedule is the record of what actually got protected, and it is not usually flattering.
Rounding is a choice
The rounding rule is the one part of a schedule nobody documents, which is exactly why it is worth looking at.
What a formula hides
The property that makes a spreadsheet usable and the property that makes it unauditable are the same property, which is why it has never been solved.
The ask that gets paid
The letters that worked were not firmer. They were shorter and they asked for one thing.
The first year you store everything
The exhaustion of the early years is not inefficiency. It is the raw material, and there is no way to acquire it cheaply.
The last ten percent
The build finished on time. The handover did not, and only one of those two things was ever in the plan.
A city whose largest employer is a government
It is not that people here are cautious. It is that the thing they are comparing against is unusually good.
Speaking better than I write
One language, two grades. I spent years assuming the lower one would catch up on its own.
The first week in a new school
The newcomer learns to infer rules from behaviour, because nobody in an established room will ever state them.
Registering a company is not starting one
The founding date on the paperwork is the one everybody celebrates, and it is almost never the day anything started.
The interruption is not the cost
What an interruption destroys is not time. It is a stack of provisional explanations nobody wrote down, including me.
Deciding an error is too small
A profession that writes down in advance which of its mistakes it will not correct is doing something most fields refuse to do.
The most consequential software ever written
Not arithmetic. Not storage. The grid made changing your mind about a number free, and everything follows from that.
Why people pay late
Nobody found new money. The penalties fell anyway, which told me the money was never the issue.
Classroom and caseload
I expected the degree and the casework to converge. They never did, and the gap between them is where the useful part was.