I think one of the more jarring things in life is to stumble upon something that you did not know that you did not know. Those things that you never even thought to consider that pop up and bite you in the ass.
I’ve had about 3 to 5 of those experiences in the last two weeks….all while in the midst of cutting multiple tens of thousand dollar purchase orders to our vendors. That is super scary for me.
Todays was so stupid it seemed almost ridiculous. I’ve literally been in the middle of a project where we were going to take a dual path in developing a product. This is on a tight deadline, so I’ve given a lot of vendors some really harsh delivery dates, and taking this dual path is stretching the budget to get two units (one from each path) delivered on time. Then today, I realize, like an idiot, I need two of whatever one we choose. And I pretty much need it within two weeks after the first one.
Wonderful. This is the last in a series of failures I’ve had in attempting to be the primary person driving all the technical details in this project with a rushed deadline that keeps creeping up so as to ship by the end of the year. Meanwhile I have to keep most of the normal projects going, so I get to be in tomorrow to clean up several ECOs that are just to make the regular day-to-day stuff work here.
I guess that old quote that I found in Walden by Thoreau (I hence learned that it is from Confucius) is right “To know that you know what you know, and to know that you do not know what you do not know, that is true knowledge.” And let me tell you, that not knowing the stuff you don’t know part is the little bug of fear that perpetually bites me in brain every time I make an engineering decision in a crunch. I think it is also the tingling feeling that I get sometimes when I’m not sure that I found all the info I need to make a decision despite having spent a long long time trying to gather all the information I need.
My hope is that with age hopefully the following increase knowledge, wisdom, and experience that the little tingly feeling and ass-whooping experiences will become less over time.