The Hardest Way
“You always choose the hardest way to do things,” she told me.
It’s true, but it’s not always so easy for me to mentally differentiate between the hardest way and the most robust way. Sometimes it’s my ego, sometimes it’s the wide-eyed engineer who just thinks more detail or development is cool, and sometimes it’s my criticality and cynicism that says to me, “if you skimp on quality up front, you know you’ll pay for it in larger ways later.”
It’s the designer’s eye for quality in me that causes me to write nearly-overkill parsers and input processors to make my program as user-friendly as possible even when the implementation language just isn’t designed for easy text processing, like C#.
It’s the hopeless romantic in me that doesn’t want to disappoint you with a botched moment that leads me to mentally orchestrate what we’ll need for every event and forget that the real finesse lies in connecting them all together to make a peaceful, fluid day.
But it was my ego that led me to think I really could light the barbecue briquettes with eucalyptus kindling to cook our lunch today. So we didn’t pick up lighter fluid yesterday, and you ended up having to go get some today while I watched over the food. That was my fault, and I’m sorry about that.
