And You've Already Paid Me For It

It isn’t that there’s a certain sweetness in it; it was very sweet.  

It’s that the vindication was so poetically understated.

I should go back to the beginning.  (Vizzini said, “If the job goes bad, go back to the beginning.”)

Two years ago, a colleague and former friend stood up in the middle of our annual professional conference, and in front of the entire body, stated unequivocally that my simple, already-paid-for solution to a complex problem was not viable.  “The last thing the Navy needs,” said he, ”is a couple of shade tree mechanics.”

I was, shall we say, discreetly offended.

For a while, my cubicle became known as “The Shade Tree”, and because I am a professional heretic, I continued to work through problems and introduce solutions…albeit more quietly.

I work for a small company that mainly provides training to the Navy.  I am employee number 7, and at this stage of our Global Domination Plan, there are ten other guys on the payroll scattered about the country.  The corporate philosophy explained to me when I joined the company was, “Do the work, and the contract will follow.”  My boss is a pretty savvy guy, and he long ago recognized that the most basic business credo of all (“Give the customer what he wants and he’ll keep coming back.”) begins with giving the customer what he wants.  My own personal approach to that has been to develop the things that Navy has paid for but deemed “unusable”.  I am, after all, being paid to train people how to use these things, so this part of what I do is in both our interests.

I have had a number of conversations that went like this:

“I have an idea for how you can make use of the Snarffblatt Gargleblasting feature,” I’ll say.

“No, you don’t.  That feature is broken.”

“Actually, it’s not.  Here’s what you—“

“Wait.  How much will this fix cost?”

“Nothing.  I didn’t fix it; it wasn’t broken.”

“But it doesn’t work.”

“Yes, it does.  Check this out—“

“We’re not paying you to fix it.”

“I didn’t fix it because it wasn’t broken.  And you’re paying me to train sailors to use it.”

“Exactly!  This isn’t training, it’s fixing.  And besides, even if it wasn’t broken, we wouldn’t know how to use it.”

“That’s what I’m saying.  It isn’t broken, and I can show you how it works.”

“We don’t want to know how it works because we don’t know how to use it.”

“I’m trying to tell you how to use it.”

“No, you’re not.  You’re trying to tell us how it works, which is impossible, because it doesn’t work, because it’s broken.”

…and suddenly, I find myself channeling John Cleese: “I’m sorry, is this the five minute argument or the full half hour?”

The usual result of all this unrequited forward thinking is that my ideas are a year to two years ahead of the Navy’s, which gives the unfortunate impression that I am unusually smart.  

This week, the Navy came to me with a problem, and I presented a solution I’ve been working on for five years.  

The Navy’s response was essentially this: “Hey, cool!  This works!  Who knew?”

Uh, I did, thankyouverymuch.  

Hey, Leonardo da Vinci never got his airplane idea off the ground – it took a couple bicycle repairmen to make a machine that actually flew.  

Don’t discount the guys under the shade tree, is all I’m sayin’.