“But Nobody DOES That!” — On Living Life as an Outlier

This morning, I was trying to get some particular aspect of my online bank account to work the way I expected it to, and I just couldn't find out how to do it.

Normally I just let these things slide and go about my day but today I decided to call customer service to ask why such a particular feature was difficult to find and use.

So I sat on hold for a while and eventually talked to her very nice person — Brian — who sincerely tried to help me and we eventually came down to the reality is that the feature I was looking for simply doesn't exist and even though he didn't use the words directly, the general subtext of the conversation was that nobody does that.

Here we go again...

Because I'm fairly used to a situation like that, I didn't end up getting too annoyed about it but it did make me sit back and reflect on the fact that I have encountered a great many things in life that just aren't designed to work the way I think life works — or should work — while the way things actually do work often make very little sense to me.

Knowing myself as I do and thinking back to my misguided years spent in the IT industry, one of my "problems" in life that I tend to run into — and that perhaps serves as an explanation for my frequent dilemma — is the fact that I like to really think things through up front and take the extra time to create time saving features now that will more than gain me back the extra effort over the next six months or six years that I'll be using something.

But we live in a world where the vast majority of people just want things fixed right now and don't actually care what the impact of making things easy today will be on their lives a month or more down the road. It's a sort of perpetual "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it attitude."

It's possible that it is linked to the fact that I'm inherently lazy that — on some level — I'm looking for what I can do extra right now so that I never have to do it again.

I used to write documentation for software back in the day when you bought software on a CD and there was something akin to a very large paperback book that came with it that told you how to use the software and get the most out of it.

One of the major reasons why I ended up quitting that particular field was the fact that management (and my group supervisor) tended to always stress the fact that we needed to write the documentation in the way that we wanted people use the software, rather than write the documentation in the manner that reflected how people actually would approach the task we were trying to solve with our software.

What I found mildly offensive about that was that it was a sort of "push technology," in which the solutions weren't human-centric — in an attempt to solve actual and real problems — but instead the solutions were company centric, as in. we have a product that will do something now let's force people to do that thing we have the product for.

That kind of crap just sits very poorly with me... although — as I've aged — I've mellowed out somewhat in terms of my outrage towards telling people off for using that approach.

I suppose there's a bit of irony in the whole thing in as much as we're often taught (as a general piece of societal value) that "the customer is always right," yet so much is created along the lines of "the company is already right" or the manufacturer or the service provider is always right.

Even though this kind of cavalier attitude tends to run through almost every aspect of our lives, I do understand that most providers of any kind of product or service are oriented towards how can they serve as many as possible following the age old principle of "you just hope to make some of the people somewhat happy some of the time."

Understandable as it might be, it also lends to a kind of pervasive mediocrity that I personally find kind of annoying. As a result of that I am a very poor consumer because I'm not going to buy something unless it kind of gets 90% close to fitting the needs that I have.

I'd rather do without than having to wrestle with a poorly conceived substitute! And that, in and of itself, also makes me a bit of an "outlier!"

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Are there ways in which you are very different from "most" of the world? Do you sometimes struggle with making your life they way you want it to be? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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***Created at 2024.07.04 00:13 PDT
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