Friday, March 9, 2012

The Easy Connection

“It’s the easy connection that’s leaking!”
- Tony Schroeder



The new coffeemaker at Choice One has been a bit of a…challenge, we’ll say, to install. Our resident plumber, Tony, isn’t the most experienced, but who knew hooking up a coffeemaker would entail so many trips to the hardware store? (If you’ve tried to plumb something yourself before, you may agree with Tony’s further statement: “No matter how many parts you buy beforehand, you NEVER have the right one.”)

Often, tasks that are supposed to be “easy” are the most challenging: think of the top competitor losing to the supposed-to-be-terrible, 12th-seeded NCAA basketball team (there’s a little free advice for your bracket next week, my friends). Sometimes the easy connection leaks because making that connection is taken for granted.

For instance, Choice One has designed hundreds of projects, but each one needs specific details and attention, even the “easy” ones. We can’t design cookie-cutter projects for the sake of time or laziness, because that’s when the “easy” details are missed. We circumvent this phenomenon by having plans reviewed by engineers not involved in the day-to-day design to look for obvious “leaks.”

Thankfully for Tony’s sanity (and ego), the coffeemaker is now up and running. (As you can imagine, every affected employee gave Tony a hard time about his ineptitude at plumbing. And the lack of coffee.) And thankfully for those of us who sit near said coffeemaker, it’s up and running without any faulty water valves thrown in frustration.

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