Non-Technical Solutions

I seem to have developed some allergies after living in Utah for the last 20 or so years. I flew in from the Bay Area on Friday evening only to have a rough night sleeping. It didn't get any better on Saturday night after a busy day of skiing and taking care of chores around the house. I'm sure it wasn't a picnic for my wife as she said I snored like a chainsaw both nights. I know from experience that when I snore loudly, I will continually wake myself up in the middle of the night and not get the rest I need.

Last night I didn't resort to anything extraordinary to get a good night's rest. I could have taken any number of medications but didn't. Instead I just applied one of those Breathe Right strips to my nose and slept very soundly. My wife informed me I wasn't completely silent last night, but much better than the past two. It is amazing what a piece of tape stuck to a stiff wire can do to help get through allergy season. While the Breathe Right people would have you believe they provide a technical solution, it is much less complicated than those provided by the pharmaceutical companies.

Non-technical solutions are sometimes the best solutions. I once worked on a reporting system where we were required to provide daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly reports. The reports were fairly complex and required a significant amount of time to create. When it came time to write the yearly report, it was determined that an administrative assistant could take the monthly reports, add up the numbers, and assemble the yearly report more quickly than it would take to write it using the existing report writing tools.

Unfortunately non-technical solutions don't work all the time and should be used only when appropriate. Otherwise we wouldn't have created computers in the first place.