I read a very interesting article this weekend in one of my sailing magazines. The story could be summarized in a couple of paragraphs but the author lengthened it by talking about the problem-solving process while on an extended sailing trip. The article talked about 3 boats sailing together and one lost its rudder in about 15 feet of water. Now a rudder for a large sailboat is not something you can just swim down and pluck off the bottom. The crews of the 3 boats gathered together and developed a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C. Why? Because plan A rarely works on its own. In the story, the crews ended up using a combination of plans A and B.
Last week I had my own sailing problem to solve and also came up with multiple solutions in case my first choice didn't work. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking due to years of drought in the American southwest. It is now too shallow for sailboats and so I need to pull mine out. Fortunately I have a trailer to put the boat on but I needed to prepare the trailer to receive it. The last time I used the trailer, I put the boat on it and the tires all went flat. We pumped them up and they held air long enough until the boat went back in the water. With the tires being 20 years old, I figured they needed to be replaced.
So how do you replace the tires for a boat trailer? My first thought was to just bring the trailer down to the local tire store and have them do all of the work. An alternative is to pull the wheels off the trailer and bring them to the tire store. Finally I had the option of just inflating the tires to the proper pressure and hope they would continue to hold air. So like the story I started with, I had 3 plans that I could use.
My preference, or plan A, was to just take the trailer to the tire store. My justification for this is that I have submerged the trailer in the Great Salt Lake and I convinced myself that the lug bolts had welded themselves to the hub and would require serious work to remove them. The downside to this plan was that I would have to do the necessary work to make the trailer safe on the road. That means making sure all of the lights work (questionable because of trailer dunking) and that the hitch lock worked correctly.
The night before getting new tires, I couldn't sleep. Ultimately I prepared to execute all 3 plans before heading to the marina where I keep the trailer. The simplest solution was to just pull the wheels off and so I started with that. The trailer surprised me and the lug bolts came off without too much difficulty. It only took 30 minutes to jack up the trailer, remove the wheels, and put them in the back of my truck.
I easily got the wheels to the tire shop and they thanked me for not bringing the entire trailer. They installed the new tires in just a few hours and I had them back on the trailer that evening. Now my trailer is prepared to receive the sailboat. Once the boat is on the trailer, we will store it at the marina until the lake level comes back up enough to put it back in the water. There is no need to take the trailer on public roads.
So why is it that I always come up with multiple solutions for sailing but only one for computer issues. Part of that may be that when you have a sailing problem, failure is very expensive and sometimes lethal. With a computer, you can always turn it off and think about other solutions. If you find yourself constantly frustrated by your computer problems then it might make sense to come up with multiple solutions before starting any work. While it may seem like an inefficient use of time, it will force you to think more about the issue and your plan B or plan C may actually be more efficient in actually solving of the problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment