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mknod
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mknod  ·  3400 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Parkinson's Law of Triviality  ·  

These weird laws and things really need their own coffee table book, I really like them.

I have an axiom o at work that has been deemed "The Serpentine belt axiom" it is named as such because of an experience I once had in which a friend had his car's serpentine belt replaced then blamed everything wrong thereafter on said belt.

"The air conditioning doesn't work" "The speedometer seems off" "The gears don't shift fast enough"

"A solution that is not well understood, will be given for any problem in the hopes that it will be solved in the same manner"

This happens often at work. Usually because people don't have the experience needed to solve problems effectively or the self-reflection to see how much experience was put into a problem, they think was solved trivially (This is not to disparage them, when all you see is the result it can be easy to ignore the work).

For example:

"Well I saw mknod send out an email about xyz so every issue that a customer has is now related to xyz"

My serpentine belt is the xyz, regardless of what xyz I had fixed, people are going to email me for days or weeks thinking I had done something when in fact it was unrelated to anything.