The Downside of Easy (or, the Upside of a Good Challenge)

Posted on February 11, 2016 Updated on July 20, 2025

As a young boy, I was “that kid” who would take everything apart, often leaving a formerly functional alarm clock in a hundred pieces in a shoe box. I loved figuring out how things worked and how components worked together as a system. When I was 10, I spent one winter completely disassembling and reassembling my Suzuki TM75 motorcycle in my bedroom (my parents must have had so much more patience and understanding than I do as a parent). It was rebuilt by spring and ran like a champ. Beginners luck?

By then, I was hooked – I enjoyed working with my hands and fixing things. That was a valuable skill to have while growing up, as it provided an income and led to the first company I started at the age of 18. There was always a fair degree of trial and error involved with learning, but experience and experimentation led to simplification and standardization. That became the hallmark of the programs I wrote, and later, the application systems I designed and developed. It is a trait that has served me well over the years.

Today, I still enjoy doing many things myself, especially if I can spend a little time and save hundreds of dollars (which I usually invest in more tools). Finding examples and tutorials on YouTube is usually easy, and after watching a few videos for reference, the task is generally manageable. There is also a sense of satisfaction that comes with a job well done. And most of all, it is a great distraction from everything else that keeps your mind racing at 100 mph.

My wife’s 2011 Nissan Maxima needed a Cabin Air Filter, and instead of paying $80 again to have this done, I decided to do it myself. I purchased the filter for $15 and was ready to go. This shouldn’t take more than 5 or 10 minutes. I went to YouTube to find a video, but no luck. Then, I started searching various forums for guidance. There were plenty of posts complaining about the cost of replacement, but not much about how to do the work. I finally found a post that showed where the filter door was. I could already begin to feel that sense of accomplishment I was expecting in the next few minutes.

But fate and apparently a few sadistic Nissan Engineers had other plans. First, you needed to be a contortionist in order to reach the filter once the door was removed. Then, the old filter was nearly impossible to remove. And then, once the old filter was removed, I realized that the width of the filter entry slot was approximately 50% of the width of the filter. Man, what a horrible design!

A few fruitless Google searches later, I was more determined than ever to make this work. I tried several things and ultimately found a way to fold the filter where it was small enough to get through the door and would fully open once released. A few minutes later, I was finally savoring my victory over that hellish filter change.

This experience brought back memories of “the old days.” In 1989, I was working for a marketing company as a Systems Analyst and was assigned the project to create the “Mitsubishi Bucks” salesperson incentive program. Salespeople would earn points for sales and could later redeem those points on Mitsubishi Electronics products. It was a very popular and successful incentive program.

Creating the forms and reports was straightforward, but tracking the points (which included generating past reports and adjusting activity from previous periods) presented a problem. I finally considered how a banking system would work (remember, there were no books on the topic before the Internet, so this was essentially reinventing the wheel) and designed my own. It was very exciting and rock solid. Statements could be accurately reproduced at any time, and an audit trail was maintained for all activity.

Next, I needed to create validation processes and a fraud detection system for incoming data. This was rock solid, but instead of being a good thing, it became a real headache and source of frustration.

Salespeople would not always provide complete information, might have sloppy penmanship, or engage in other legitimate but unusual practices (such as bundling and adjusting prices among items in the bundle). Despite that, they expected immediate rewards, and having their submissions rejected apparently created more frustration than incentive.

So, I was instructed to turn the fraud detection dial way back. I let everyone know that while this would minimize rejections, it would increase the potential for fraud and the volume of rewards. I created a few reports to identify potentially fraudulent activity. It was amazing how creative people could be when trying to cheat the system, and how you could quickly identify patterns based on similar types of activities. By the third month, the system was trouble-free.

It was a great learning experience from beginning to end. It ran for several years after I left – something I know because I was still receiving the sample mailing with new sales promotions and “Spiffs” (sales incentives) every month. My later reflection made me wonder how many things are not being created or improved today because it is easier and less risky to follow an existing template.

We used to align fields and columns in byte order to minimize record size, overload operators, and other optimizations to maximize space utilization and performance. Our code was optimized for maximum efficiency because memory was scarce and processors were slow. Profiling and benchmarking programs brought you to the next level of performance. In a nutshell, you were forced to understand and become proficient with the technology used out of necessity. Today, these concepts have become somewhat of a lost art.

There are many upsides to being easy.

What will the impact be on human behavior once Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes a reality and is in everyday use? It would be great to look ahead for 25, 50, or 100 years and see the full impact of emerging technologies, but my guess is that I will see many of the effects in my own lifetime.