Excellent analogy, Sir Phillip! :-)
Pertinent, accurate and most amusing all at the same time.
Thanks,
keith whaley
Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
MCBastos wrote:
To draw a very simple parallel, there's very little haste and stress
involved in getting on the subway to travel cross-town... because if I
miss this train, there will be another a few minutes later, and you can
get on it with minimum effort and little lost time. Getting on a plane,
OTOH, involves quite a lot of worry and rushing around, because if I
miss the plane, there might take hours to get on another one, with
considerable annoyance, expenses and lost time.
Well, let's explore your metaphor further -- let's say you were used
to catching the 20:14, which stopped everywhere you wanted it to,
didn't stop at strange, out-of-the-way, stations, was reliable,
punctual and got you to the office on time. Then the 20:14 was
cancelled (well, not really cancelled, but all the station staff
told you that it wasn't really safe any more, even though it was
exactly the same train you had been using for months), and they
really thought that you should start taking the 22:00 instead.
So you did what they recommended, and strange things started to
happen; it no longer stopped everywhere it used to, stopped at
strange, out-of-the-way stations that no-one had ever heard of,
your luggage would frequently disappear without trace, you
were automatically sat alongside a bunch of other folk you'd
never seen before instead of having a carriage to yourself,
and various other oddities occurred that forced you to wonder
what exactly was so wrong with the good old 20:14. And then
the 22:00 was cancelled, and replaced by the 23:00, which had
its own set of quirks, and then there was the 24:00 and the 24:10
which replaced it shortly afterwards, and all the staff kept
assuring you that this regular change of timetable was in
everyone's interest, and they didn't mind working their @rses
off so that new timetables could be published every six weeks,
and so on.
And then someone had a brainwave -- "look", he said, "just because
the rail network keeps introducing new trains doesn't mean that
we commuters have to follow suit; why don't we just agree amongst
ourselves that /our/ timetable will change only every six months ?
Sure there'll be trains that are faster than ours, painted in
prettier, more psychedelic colours, with go-faster stripes and
all the bells and whistles you could possibly ask for, but our
trains will have one great advantage : we will have dry-run them
for a minimum of three months before we let a single commuter loose
on them; they'll be thoroughly way-tested by our dedicated band
of better-testers (as we call them in the rail trade), we'll
make sure that all the rough edges to the seats that were there
when they left the factory have been removed, we'll make sure
that the train stops where /our/ passengers want it to stop,
and that it sails through those crazy stations that the rail
network think it ought to, and so on.
Now wouldn't you, Mr Bastos, think twice before willingly agree
to catch a different train every six weeks, and wouldn't you
perhaps prefer to catch a slightly slower train in the the sure
and certain knowledge that it would be /reliable/, would manifest
no unexpected behaviour, and even if it wasn't 100% bullet-proof
against the latest weapons of micro-destruction ("WMD"s, as they
are called in the trade, or "Viruses" and "Trojan Horses", as it
is rumoured they were once known), there was still a 99.999%
probability that you would arrive safely, particularly because
you long ago invested in some good, modern, anti-WMD protection
that made sure that your train would almost never encounter those
WMDs in the first place ?
The defence rests, m'lud.
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