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

Posted on February 11, 2016 Updated on November 29, 2023

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 great skill to have while growing up as it provided income and led to the first company I started at age 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 that 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 pretty easy, and after watching a few videos for reference, the task is generally easy. There is also a sense of satisfaction to a job well done. And most of all, it is a great distraction to 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 a lot 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 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 intent than ever on making 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.

This experience made me recall “the old days.” Back in 1989, I was working for a marketing company as a Systems Analyst and was given 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 presented a problem. I finally thought about how a banking system would work (remember, there was no Internet and few books on the topic, so this was reinventing the wheel) and designed my own. It was very exciting and rock solid. Statements could be accurately reproduced at any time, and there was an audit trail for all activity.

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

Salespeople would not always provide complete information, might have sloppy penmanship, or would do other odd but legitimate things. 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 increases the potential for fraud and costs more in 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 identify patterns to more quickly identify that type of activity. By the third month, the system was trouble-free.

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

We used to align fields and columns in byte order to minimize record size, overload operators, etc. to maximize space utilization and performance. 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 those concepts have become somewhat of a lost art.

There are many upsides to 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.