So, I was looking at a crossword puzzle earlier today. Got stuck on one clue, just staring at it, you know? The kind where the word feels familiar, but you just can’t pin it down.
It got me thinking about those people, the ones who just breeze through these things. There’s even a word for them, something like… crossword experts? Always amazed me how they just know words, even the weird ones. Makes you feel a bit thick sometimes.
That time with the “simple” spec change
It actually reminded me of this job I had a few years back. Not puzzles, but words definitely tripped me up. We were working on this software update. Pretty routine stuff, or so I thought. My boss sends over an email, just a quick note, asking me to “enhance the logging mechanism.”
Simple enough, right? “Enhance.” To me, that meant add more detail, make it more verbose. So, I spent a couple of days digging into the code. I added timestamps everywhere, context details, user IDs, the whole nine yards. Really beefed it up. I was actually quite pleased with myself, thought I’d gone above and beyond.
Well, rolled it out to the test environment. Next thing I know, everything grinds to a halt. The system was barely usable. Why? Because my “enhanced” logging was writing so much data, so often, it was choking the disk and slowing the whole application down to a crawl.
- Turns out, when my boss said “enhance,” he meant something totally different.
- He wanted me to make it smarter, maybe log only critical errors better, or make the existing logs easier to filter.
- Definitely not just “make it bigger.”
Had a pretty awkward conversation after that. Had to spend the next day ripping out all my beautiful, detailed logging and figuring out what he actually wanted. It wasn’t even that complex, just required understanding that one word, “enhance,” in the context of system performance, not just adding features.
Felt like a right idiot. All that effort, completely wrong direction because I assumed the meaning of a simple word. So yeah, when I get stuck on a crossword clue now, I think back to that. It’s not just about knowing words, it’s about knowing the right meaning in the right place. Makes you appreciate the precision of it all, even when it’s frustrating.
