60 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
60 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: Master Logician
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tags:
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- opinion
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---
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Shortly before [departing for
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FOSDEM](/2012/01/31/be-there-sunday-at-fosdem.html), I dropped my car at the
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mechanic's to fix an engine issue. Some number of weeks later, I finally was
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able to pick the vehicle up today, fully repaired and ready to undergo further
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damage at the hands of yours truly.
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Earlier this week I called the shop, after not having heard from them for
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a couple weeks, wondering what the status of the repair was. The mechanic's
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response was something along the lines of:
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> "*Oh yeah, we tried to call you but the number was busy or something every
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> time. Anyways, your car needs a new flux capac..*"
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"Well, I was out of the country" I thought, my line had effectively been
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disconnected, so I suppose that's what the mechanic had experienced when he
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tried to contact me. Something still seemed a little fishy to me.
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Before hanging up the phone, I asked him what phone number he had for me, just
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to make sure they could contact me again after they made a few further repairs:
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> "*Uh let's see here, 475-7..*"
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If you're a bay area resident you can see the problem, the area code is
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4**1**5, not 475.
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Simple enough of a mistake , but what really bothered me
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about the mistake was that it seems (to me) so obvious or clear to resolve. In
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fact one simple hypothesis ("this is probably a wrong number") and an experiment
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("what if I call 415-etc") would have saved over a week of time spent "in
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limbo."
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Like most city garages, this place is certainly limited for space to store cars
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that are either waiting to be fixed or waiting to be picked up. I've also been
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to this mechanic three or four times now, so they've previously been able to
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reach me. On top of that, area code 475 is in Connecticut of all places; this
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mechanic is good, but not good enough to justify that kind of commute.
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A little skepticism would have cut the amount of time the car spent in the shop
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from 3 weeks to about 4 days.
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I'm clearly obsessing a little too much over this minor inconvenience.
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Sometimes I need to be reminded that perhaps everybody doesn't think like me,
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doesn't question or care about every little detail in the same way that I
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might.
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