Sometimes I feel like a grumpy old man.
Why am I always having to complain or deal with the incompetence of others?
Why can’t I just buy something, sell something, renew something, build something or ask somebody to do the job they’re being paid to do without eventually finding myself writing an email beginning:
“Dear whoever, thank you for your response, however…”
I don’t want to write that fucking email.
Nobody wakes up in the morning excited about escalating a complaint.
I have things to do.
I’ve got businesses to run. Software to build. Music to make. A house to sell. A life I’d quite like to occasionally live.
Yet somehow I spend an extraordinary amount of time pointing out that the thing somebody says happened didn’t happen, the thing they say works doesn’t work, the information on their website isn’t correct, the process doesn’t make sense, or — increasingly in my life — the fucking map is wrong.
And sometimes I wonder whether the problem is me.
Maybe I’ve reached that age.
I’m 53.
Perhaps this is how it starts.
First you complain about public footpaths.
Then you start writing strongly worded letters to the council.
Before you know it you’re photographing potholes, measuring your neighbour’s hedge and standing at the window muttering about where people have parked.
Give it another five years and I’ll be writing to the BBC because somebody on Countryfile said “less” when they meant “fewer”.
Maybe I am becoming a grumpy old man.
Except there’s a problem with that explanation.
Quite often, I’m fucking right.
And that’s much more annoying.
I don’t actually enjoy complaining
I think this is the bit people misunderstand about people who complain.
There are obviously people who enjoy it.
They hunt for mistakes. They demand managers. They regard a £4.50 refund as a matter of constitutional principle.
That’s not me.
My preferred outcome in almost every interaction is remarkably simple:
The thing fucking works.
That’s it.
I don’t need perfection.
I don’t expect humans never to make mistakes.
I run software companies. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over nearly thirty years, it’s that humans make mistakes with astonishing creativity.
I certainly do.
Software has bugs.
People misunderstand things.
Emails get missed.
Processes fail.
Somebody has a bad day.
Fine.
The thing that gets me isn’t usually the original mistake.
It’s what happens after somebody points it out.
That’s where organisations reveal themselves.
That’s odd
One of the most useful phrases in business is:
That’s odd.
Something doesn’t correspond with what you expected.
That’s odd.
A customer says your software behaves differently from your documentation.
That’s odd.
The numbers in two systems don’t match.
That’s odd.
A public footpath that has apparently existed for decades doesn’t correspond with the line in your database.
That’s odd.
Now you have a choice.
You can investigate.
Or you can defend the system.
And fucking hell, a lot of organisations choose the second one.
The computer says this.
The policy says that.
The map says this.
Our records show that.
That’s the process.
We’ve always done it this way.
None of those things actually establish that the underlying reality is correct.
They establish what the organisation believes reality to be.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
Computer says no has evolved
We used to joke about “computer says no.”
But I think we’ve built something worse.
Computer says you’re wrong.
The database contains a piece of information.
Therefore the information must be true.
A process generated an outcome.
Therefore the outcome must be correct.
A box has been ticked.
Therefore the thing represented by the box must have happened.
The system stops being a tool for understanding reality and becomes the authority on what reality is allowed to be.
I’ve written recently about my increasingly ridiculous argument with Cornwall Council over public footpaths at our property.
At the heart of that entire saga is essentially this problem.
Their map says one thing.
The physical world appears to say another.
We have old maps.
Historical descriptions.
Photographs.
Physical evidence.
We’ve invited them to come and look.
And yet the gravitational pull of the official record is enormous.
I understand why.
You need systems.
You need records.
You need procedures.
Civilisation would become fairly fucking difficult if every question had to be reconstructed from first principles.
But the whole point of keeping records is to represent reality.
When credible evidence suggests the record might be wrong, the appropriate response shouldn’t be to demand that reality comply.
It should be:
That’s odd. Let’s investigate.
This isn’t really about incompetence
I’ve been thinking about the word incompetence, because it’s the word that comes into my head when I’m annoyed.
“Why am I always dealing with other people’s incompetence?”
But I don’t think that’s actually the problem.
Most of the people involved in these situations probably aren’t incompetent.
They’re operating inside systems.
And systems create incentives.
Close the ticket.
Follow the procedure.
Use the approved data.
Don’t take ownership of something outside your remit.
Don’t create another piece of work.
Don’t make a decision you’re not authorised to make.
Pass it to somebody else.
The individual can be perfectly competent while the collective result is completely fucking stupid.
In software we’d recognise this immediately.
If a user repeatedly does something “wrong”, eventually you stop blaming the user and look at the interface.
If five developers independently introduce the same class of bug, you look at the architecture.
If support keeps receiving the same question, you look at the product.
Repeated failure is information.
Yet outside software we seem extraordinarily willing to build processes that repeatedly produce absurd outcomes and then treat each absurd outcome as an isolated incident.
Maybe age has something to do with it
There probably is a grumpy-old-man component.
At 23, I probably tolerated more bullshit.
At 53, I’ve seen enough systems to recognise when something doesn’t smell right.
I’ve also become much less impressed by authority.
Not because I think I know everything.
Quite the opposite.
The older I get, the more aware I become that nobody knows everything.
The expert can be wrong.
The database can be wrong.
The government can be wrong.
The customer can be wrong.
I can be wrong.
The AI can definitely be fucking wrong.
The important thing isn’t being right all the time.
It’s maintaining the ability to discover that you’re wrong.
That’s what good systems do.
That’s what good people do.
And perhaps that’s what increasingly frustrates me.
Not mistakes.
Resistance to correction.
So perhaps I am a grumpy old man
I’m increasingly comfortable with that possibility.
Maybe one day I’ll have the full uniform.
Cardigan.
Reading glasses on a string.
A folder containing correspondence arranged chronologically.
Photographic evidence.
A ruler.
A deep and troubling knowledge of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 that no normal human being should possess.
I’ll corner unsuspecting visitors and say:
“You see this stile? Photograph taken 21 June 2010…”
And they’ll desperately look for an escape route.
Unfortunately Cornwall Council’s Definitive Map will tell them it goes through my back garden.
But I don’t think I’m going to stop complaining when something is demonstrably wrong.
Because the alternative is worse.
Every broken process survives because eventually somebody gets tired of arguing with it.
Somebody pays the £3,500.
Somebody accepts the incorrect bill.
Somebody abandons the complaint.
Somebody changes their drawing.
Somebody clicks the box.
Somebody says:
Fuck it. It’s easier.
And the system learns absolutely nothing.
So yes.
Sometimes I feel like a grumpy old man.
Maybe I am one.
But occasionally the grumpy old man standing there pointing at something and saying:
“That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
is performing a useful service.
Even if everybody wishes he’d shut up.