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Please feel free to use the Article -
"ADAPT OR STRUGGLE, IT'S YOUR CHOICE!"
in your publication. The article must
be used in its entirety with the
resource box included at the bottom.
Article was written in October, 1999.
Copyright © 1999, 2000 by Bill Platt
WORD COUNT: 985
CHARACTERS: 65 wide
This article may be obtained already formatted
for email, via autoresponder at:
Adapt-Or-Struggle@WindstormComputing.com
Though it is not a requirement for publication,
I do ask that as a courtesy, you send a copy of
your publication with the article inside to:
EDITOR @
WINDSTORM COMPUTING.COM.
By matching the publication of an article with
the jump in traffic, it gives me a better idea
of where I might like to do ad swaps or
advertising, in the future. Thank you.
================ BEGIN ARTICLE =================
Adapt Or Struggle,
It's Your Choice
I was listening to "Second Thoughts with Mort Crim" this
afternoon. If you are not familiar with Mort Crim, I might
recommend you visit your local bookstore and look for his
Second Thought books. By parsing together different real life
stories, he manages to bring an uplifting point to every story.
Anyhow, he was talking today about the general fear people
have regarding change. He suggested that there may be people
we meet in everyday life that insist that we should not try
something new because "we have always done it this way".
He mentioned that back 80 to 100 years ago, there may have
been those who did not think it necessary to bring toilets
inside the house, or to take up driving cars. After all, if
it isn't broke, why fix it?
7 words in the English language have had the most negative
impact on progress "we have always done it this way".
His point in today's story is this:
"A certain amount of change is inevitable. We don't always
choose it. But we can choose to whether to use change as a
positive force or to let it crush us."
This story brought to my mind two separate incidences in
my mind as far as computer troubleshooting goes. One involved
myself, and the other did not.
The other involved a friend of mine who is an able computer
troubleshooter. Currently, he is self-employed as a computer
technician, but previously he was a technician for a local
computer company. He told me the story of how it came to be
that he had gotten canned from the job he so loved.
He was doing some troubleshooting on a hard drive. He
recognized the problem from past experience, and promptly
moved to correct the problem, when his boss came into the
room. His boss asked him why he was doing it the way he
was. He told his boss why, which just angered his boss.
His boss' exact words were, "We have always done it this
way, and that is the way we will continue to do it!"
He told me that he went ahead and did it his boss' way
as instructed, yet by no surprise, that did not solve
the problem. When he had exhausted the old process, he
then turned to what he knew would fix the problem. He
fixed the hard drive in question, but when his boss
discovered how he fixed it, he found himself without
a job.
My situation was somewhat similar. With a different
boss at a different company in a different town, I ran
into the same kind of thinking. It did not cost me my
job, but it did cause a lot of turmoil between me an
my superior for the remainder of my stay at that job.
Our situation was in trying to send email to the company
server from the job site using our company laptop. My boss
was a MacIntosh guy, and I was the onsite troubleshooter
for the computer networks with DOS, Windows and Unix
operating systems. Our laptop was Windows 95, and we had
been having fits with sending our daily reports into the
company. This day being no exception.
The previous night, I had taken the laptop to my hotel
room and spent a couple of hours messing with the system
to find a work-around solution to our email problem. I
was successful in that endeavor. But the next day when we
returned to the site, my off-duty work became irrelevant.
At the end of the day, when it was time to send in our
daily report, I sat down to the laptop to do just that.
My boss was standing over my shoulder and when he realized
how I was doing it, he became very agitated. As if we were
suddenly time transported back in time, he began barking
orders as if he were suddenly a drill sergeant in the
military once again.
For a short time, I tried to do it his way to show him that
it probably would not work that way. When it was unsuccessful,
I tried to explain to him that I had found a work-around that
would work in every single instance. He was not in the mood to
listen. He wanted me to do it His Way! Frustrated, I told him
that if we did it his way, we could be there all night, and
if we did it my way, we would be done in a couple of minutes.
Fuming, he stormed out of the room, yelling at me as he left
to go ahead and do it my way. As I had told him, the email
was sent in a few minutes, and we could call it a day now.
He was not satisfied. As it turned out, we couldn't call it
a day at that point. We still had to endure 2 hours of him
yelling at me for questioning his authority.
"We have always done it this way". Don't let these 7
words detour progress in your life and in your computer
troubleshooting experiences.
Just be sure to be careful about how you might implement
this advice. Let the following story show you what I mean:
The efficiency expert concluded his lecture with a note
of caution. You don't want to try these techniques at
home.
"Why not?" asked somebody from the audience.
"I watched my wife's routine at breakfast for years," the
expert explained. "She made lots of trips between the
refrigerator, stove, table and cabinets, often carrying a
single item at a time. One day I told her, Hon, why don't
you try carrying several things at once?"
"Did it save time?" the guy in the audience asked.
"Actually, yes", replied the expert. "It used to take her
20 minutes to make breakfast. Now I do it in seven."
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Bill Platt owns The Phantom Writers, a company committed to
helping people to establish an Internet presence & promote their
businesses through the use of Free-Reprint Articles, just like
the one you have just finished reading. His article distribution
service can help you deliver your reprint articles to a much larger
audience: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com
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