Message of the Day - When the Medicine is Worse Than the Disease

Good Morning,

 

Back in the late 1990's I had a tick bite. After having the tick removed, I went to the Doctor's office and was prescribed Cipro. This antibiotic is a powerhouse. It killed every unwanted bacteria in my body and probably a few that I wanted to keep. Anyway, the medicine made gave me a major headache, sensitive to light, unable to focus on my work, and ultimately I had to take a few days off from work. The medication made me ill and it was brutal. At times I wondered if I should have just taken my chances with getting Lime's disease.

 

This made me wonder about other solutions we try to implement for problems we see. For example, in a previous company, we had a simple back up plan for call routing if our phones went down. We could plug in cell phone numbers into the system and the calls would come to our cell phones instead of our desk phones. Change the number and we were ready to go. Then we installed a complete back up phone system, server and all. When this system was activated, it would have to programmed and redirected, to each of our desk phones and took up to an hour to make the changes.

 

When we had hiccups in the phones, they generally did not last more than a few minutes, but using the new back up system, the solution took over an hour to activate and then deactivate. In effect, the solution caused more confusion and heartache than the problem for the staff and management.

 

Ultimately that solution was retired after a few uses in favor of a less complicated and painful one.

 

I also remember a time from Black Lake where folks who owned land on the lake had access to their property by oil and chipped roads. These people once came to a community meeting to complain about there being so many potholes in the roads and wanted the town to fix them. A bigger complaint though was about people driving on the roads too quickly and the land owners wanted the town to put in speed bumps to slow down the drivers. My uncle came up with a simple and cheap solution: to leave the roads as they were. The potholes as they got worse would force drivers to slow down.

 

Are there solutions to problems that you use which are more painful, confusing and time consuming than the problem itself?

 

Could these solutions be replaced by something simpler, like they did on Black Lake?

 

Enjoy!

 

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net

http://learnandgrowdaily.com ←-Click here to order: "Learn And Grow Daily!"

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

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