Meredith and I used to have two different lives. Our home life and our work life. Our jobs were very different, so the personalities and habits that we had at work were night and day.
When we left our careers and moved onto a boat, those other selves had to go somewhere…so they came with us. they didn’t have the workplace to show their faces, so they began to appear in our daily lives.
Meredith was a flight nurse (fly around on a helicopter saving lives). Lives literally depended on her ability to perform. There was no room for not knowing the answer, and they had specialists at the ready to answer any questions.
I (Greg) was in software. Everything that we built, we built for the first time. There was no “right” answer, just some that could be considered better than others, based on your opinion. If something was broken, you tinkered (debugged) with it until you got it working. If you got in a total jam, that’s when you might call up a coworker and see what they thought.
Here’s how that plays out on the boat. The dinghy broke. That’s not true. The davit broke. The davit is the mechanisim holding the dinghy up in the air on the back of the boat. it keeps the dinghy from banging around while underway. It’s held together with a series of ropes and pullys (lines and blocks) and a couple shackles. The shackles are small stainless steel u bolts, and ours liked to break. The first one broke when we were at anchor in a storm, causing the dingy to fall in the middle of the night. The second one broke while we were underway in a storm, causing the dinghy to fall in the middle of some nasty waves.
Greg: interesting. well, both happened in a storm, so that probably has something to do with it. I wonder if there are different types of shackes? What if I just use a regular bolt instead of a U bolt? Maybe I could just beef it all up with some more lines (rope) and we’d be good? It always happens on the side with the motor, so maybe the weight has something to do with it. I think I’ll try the regular bolt and see what happens.
Meredith: you don’t know what you’re doing. Call Jamie. (Jamie is our lifesaver of a mentor/coach on all things boat).
Prioritization is another example. In Meredith’s job, you do the most critical thing on the list, and move down the line until you’re done. That’s how people live. It’s not so cut and dry in my world. In software, we usually start with the most critical thing, but if we just work on the tough stuff, people will burn out. To give developers time to be creative and relieve the stress, we work on some of the fun stuff alongside the critical stuff. Yeah, go ahead and see if you can get that new feature you’ve been noodling on working after you get the performance issue fixed. That’s where innovation happens, and that’s why there’s cool software out there. If Meredith did that in the chaotic environment of a helicopter, people would literally die.
Here’s an example:
Greg: This trim is really gross. I’m going to clean it up. I’m not sure how I’m going to clean it, because nothing seems to work (see example 1). The internet says either acetone or sanding should do the job. It’s hard to work with while it’s still installed, so I’m going to pull it all down and sand it inch by inch. It’ll take weeks, but it will look great when it’s done.
Meredith: WTF. The engine’s broken, why are you talking about trim?
It’s easy to see from these examples that Meredith’s approach is more appropriate by far, and that she is the superior intellect in our relationship. I promise that I’m not just saying that because she is my editor and reads all my posts before publishing.
In actuality, we’re both right, and we’re both wrong. We’re not building software or saving lives. We’re trying to get accustomed to our new lives on our 15 year old (that’s old for a boat) floating home. It’s our home, so we want it to look nice and be comfortable…but we also want it to keep floating.
We have learned more about each other in the last four months than the last four years. It’s a bit like being newlyweds again. Well, newlyweds that live in a tiny floating apartment with three kids, a dog and a cat, and absolutely no privacy. get it?