Working To Perfection

As Monsieur Voltaire so sweetly and succinctly pointed out, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Fortunately in some fields of work perfection is not required. The extreme example is hitting a baseball. There are people earning a million dollars a year for hitting a ball and if they manage to do it successfully on 30% of their times at bat, they are stars. It would seem that, averaged over the full profession, civil trial lawyers must succeed only about 50% of the time, as for every winner, there is a loser. I believe psychiatrists do pretty well financially, though I’m not sure I ever heard of anyone being cured of anything by his shrink. I find a lot of comedians are just not that funny and people are allowed to write on blogspot for free without limit, even if no one ever tunes in to see what they have to say. Need I mention weather forecasting? Computers? Software? Web sites? How about financial advising where I suspect practitioners earn more for producing less benefits than even baseball players. Yes, I think there is a fair amount of imperfection going around.

Still, probably in most fields of work a pretty high level of performance is expected. Clothes that shrink, shoes that blister, cars that stall, are taken back. A portion of the lawyers mentioned above practice their trade on behalf of dissatisfied medical patients. (A neighbor recently told me that when he went in to get a knee replacement his wife wrapped a piece of tape around each leg. On one was written the word doctor. On the other she wrote lawyer. When the doc saw it he went and got his camera and took a picture.) Double entry bookkeeping is a system in which every transaction requires two notations which when summed up over all the transactions for all the accounting period, must balance out. Failure to do so indicates that some error has been made and it must be hunted down and corrected. In bookkeeping perfection is the standard. Which brings us at last to plumbing.

The job of the plumber is water control; the nice clean water coming in and the sour nasty water going out. The place of the sweet water is within a system of pipes that brings it to the point of use. It is supposed to stay within the pipes until it reaches its time and place of use at some sink or toilet. It is not to slip away prematurely. The plumber makes that happen. The route of the pipes from the single line that enters the house to the various points of water use is circuitous, maybe even tortured. The line undulates and bifurcates and copulates (couples) and includes gates (valves). In the case of copper pipe, at each such turn and coupling and division the ends of two pipes are soldered to a fitting that holds the pieces together. Here again we have a case where perfection is required. It does not do to have most of the joints water tight. They must all be so. 100%. Working conditions are not always ideal. Sometimes the fitting to be soldered is in close proximity to a flammable object like a floor joist, or some wiring. Sometimes it is impossible to see the back side of the piece the plumber is working on and he must work by Braille. Sometimes the work space is cramped and it is hard to point the torch or hold the solder in the right spot. And finally the required perfection is complicated by the fact that there is no way to check the individual joints until the whole system is connected and the water turned on.

The lazy optimist does not make a good plumber. The lazy person never wants to do more than the minimal required and the optimist tends to think that what has been done has been done right. He melts on a little solder and assumes that’s good. When he thinks he’s finished he doesn’t double check to be sure he actually did every joint or that he actually connected the hot water source to the hot water faucets and not say, to the toilet or back yard spigot. He just turns on the water. No, the lazy optimist is not well suited to plumbing. He should stick to blogging. But the stubborn, cheap, lazy optimist would never call a plumber. Plumbing is not that hard.