It Should Have Been Simple

I have developed a theory about modern life.

There are no simple tasks.

There are tasks that appear to be simple, tasks that ought to be simple, and tasks that someone assures you will only take a few minutes. But somewhere between starting and finishing, something happens that makes the undertaking considerably more complicated than anyone anticipated.

Murphy figured out decades ago that if something can go wrong, it will. I’m not about to challenge him. But I’ve come to appreciate a related principle: There are no simple tasks. There are only tasks whose complications haven’t been discovered yet.

The Case of the Kitchen Blinds

Recently, I needed to replace the batteries in our kitchen blinds. This shouldn’t have been complicated. The manufacturer even had a YouTube video demonstrating how to open the battery compartment.

I watched the video. The presenter located a small latch, released the cover, and demonstrated how simple the procedure was.

Unfortunately, whoever assembled my blinds apparently hadn’t watched the same video.

The latch wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

After considerable investigation, I eventually discovered it in a different location. The cover opened, the batteries were replaced, and the blinds worked again.

The actual battery replacement took about two minutes. Finding out how to accomplish it took considerably longer.

Nothing was broken. The instructions weren’t necessarily wrong. They simply didn’t describe the version of the product hanging in my kitchen.

And that seems to happen rather frequently.

Sometimes We Create Our Own Problems

Of course, not every unexpected complication can be blamed on the manufacturer.

Some time ago, I decided to clean up some overgrown perennial grasses using my electric clippers. This was another simple task. Trim the grasses, collect the debris, and admire the results.

Unfortunately, somewhere inside the vegetation was a section of drip irrigation hose.

The clippers found it.

What had been a gardening project suddenly became an irrigation repair project, involving tools, replacement parts, and considerably more time than I had planned to spend outdoors.

On another occasion, I was using electric hedge clippers to trim some overgrown branches. Things were going reasonably well until I discovered that the clippers were also remarkably effective at cutting through their own extension cord.

That brought the landscaping project to an abrupt conclusion.

I suppose both incidents could be attributed to operator error, although I prefer to think of them as unplanned demonstrations of the versatility of modern cutting equipment.

In each case, the original job was straightforward. The complications came from something that happened along the way.

The Mystery of the Missing Money

My latest adventure has involved Quicken, the financial management software I’ve used for years.

The objective was simple enough. Download transactions from my banks, move them into Quicken, categorize the expenses, and obtain a reasonably accurate picture of where the money has been going.

Both the banks and Quicken provide tools specifically designed to accomplish this. Presumably, millions of people use them successfully.

What could possibly go wrong?

Initially, I couldn’t seem to get the transactions to appear in Quicken at all. After some investigation, I discovered that a filter was set to display only cleared transactions. Since I hadn’t reconciled the accounts, there weren’t any cleared transactions to display.

The transactions weren’t necessarily missing. They were simply invisible.

Once I discovered the filter, the expense transactions appeared, and I was finally making progress.

Except the income transactions weren’t showing up.

Why? I still don’t know. Perhaps another setting is involved. Perhaps something happens during the download or import process. Perhaps Quicken and the bank have different ideas about how income should be handled.

I eventually concluded that entering the income transactions manually would take less time than figuring out why they weren’t appearing.

So that’s what I did.

The mystery remains unsolved, but at least the job is moving forward.

Unfortunately, there was another complication.

When I write a check or arrange an electronic payment through my bank, the financial institution processes the transaction. Yet the information downloaded into Quicken zdoesn’t include the payee.

This leaves me opening individual transactions, figuring out who received the money, entering the missing payee information, and assigning the appropriate expense category.

Multiply that by a year’s worth of transactions, and a convenient automated process becomes a substantial clerical undertaking.

The bank completed its part of the transaction. Quicken imported what it received. And I inherited the work required to make the information useful.

I don’t recall volunteering for that assignment.

The Problem With Simple Tasks

The more I think about these experiences, the more convinced I become that the problem isn’t necessarily poor design, defective equipment, or user incompetence.

Sometimes it is one of those things. Occasionally, as my gardening adventures demonstrate, it’s definitely the user.

But often the complication arises because the world doesn’t behave quite the way we expected.

The manufacturer assumes we’re using the version of the product illustrated in its instructions. The software developer assumes we’ll follow a particular sequence of operations. The bank assumes the information it provides is sufficient for whatever we intend to do with it.

And we users make assumptions of our own.

We assume the latch will be where the video says it is. We assume the transaction download will include all the transactions. We assume the equipment will operate as expected.

Most of the time, these assumptions are reasonable.

Unfortunately, reasonable assumptions don’t always produce the expected results.

And when something unexpected happens, the responsibility for figuring out how to proceed usually falls on the person trying to accomplish the original task.

The instructions tell us how something is supposed to work. They rarely tell us what to do when it doesn’t.

Getting the Job Done

There’s another aspect of this that I find interesting.

When we estimate how long something will take, we generally calculate the time required to perform the intended task.

We don’t include the time required to find the misplaced latch, repair the irrigation hose, replace an extension cord, or investigate why financial transactions have disappeared.

Yet those unplanned activities can consume more time than the original task.

I’ve spent much of my professional life working with technology and managing complicated projects. You might think that experience would have taught me to anticipate these things.

Apparently not.

Some time ago, I wrote an article titled Do You Have a Teenager Handy? about remaining curious and willing to learn new technology, regardless of age. I still believe that’s important.

But a willingness to learn doesn’t guarantee that things will work as expected. Neither does experience.

Sometimes the only practical solution is to figure out what went wrong, find another approach, and get on with the job.

My Quicken records are finally getting organized. The kitchen blinds have fresh batteries. The irrigation hose was repaired. And I have become considerably more attentive to the location of extension cords when using hedge clippers.

I’ve also stopped assuming that something will be easy just because it ought to be.

The task may be simple.

Getting it done is another matter entirely.