Oh, my favorite topic right now. Parkinson’s Law.
Also, when did I become so grumpy and, as Pam calls it, the “get off my lawn” guy. I kind of just yell at clouds at the moment, huh.
I must just be frustrated. Angry at things I no longer tolerate. I am tired of being the quiet kid who knows how to do a bunch of things, and doesn’t question the why of the things I am doing.
No more of that nonsense. We are onto the ridiculousness of fancy people and their stupid ideas. We are now onto the bike shed.
Petaluma recently added the new(?) California slogan to get people to slow down. It was obviously created by someone who thinks they are funny. You know the type. The ones who are not funny.
The slogan is “Slow The Fast Down” written in clever little lettering.
“Oh shit!” They exclaimed. “You know what would be hella funny? If we acted like we were swearing, but used a word that, in context, makes no fucking sense! I am a god damn genius.” They would seem to say.
So fucking dumb. The sign probably causes more accidents with its dumbness.
This is an example of a bike shed. You got a few bored people in a room who don’t understand much, (like traffic safety) but they understand the fuck out of an average sign, and below average slogan.
So The Law of Triviality. Created by C. Northcote Parkinson; he wrote a bunch of stuff. My favorite is Parkinson’s Law, which boils down to two points.
The Economist
- Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion, and
- The number of workers within public administration, bureaucracy or officialdom tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want subordinates, not rivals, and that officials make work for each other.
(I wrote a bit about Parkinson’s theory during the transplant fun.)
The Law of Triviality is an “argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.” All captured in his book Parkinson’s Law, or the Pursuit of Progress.
I got my copy (which was kind of expensive) but a joy to read. So much fun.
But I love the breakdown of the law. I am paraphrasing, but that’s fun too.
So, imagine you have a nuclear power plant you’re building. You have a bunch of people in the room deciding on approval for the power plant. Tons of smart people are going to build this. But a power plant is super complex and difficult to understand.
They are also going to approve a bike shed outside. Now that’s something everyone can get behind. Everyone will have an opinion on the color of the shed. How big it is. What materials to use, and so on and so forth.
But the poor power plant will just get neglected. And eventually blindly approved.
However, before the whole power plant project is approved, they are gonna have some god damn thoughts about that bike shed.
Im the early 2000s a danish developer wrote an excellent blog post about how he had had enough of this triviality, and posted about it. (I made a T-shirt with the logo he created.) Well worth the read. He has great examples of a pop up for emails. My favorite along with the logo below:
You composed this email at a rate of more than N.NN cps. It is generally not possible to think and type at a rate faster than A.AA cps, and therefore your reply is likely to incoherent, badly thought out and/or emotional. A cool off timer will prevent you from sending any email for the next one hour.
[Cancel] 
So this is applicable to everything. Whenever someone focuses on the most trivial thing as if the whole project hinges on it. It’s a bike shed.
if someone spends two days reviewing the text, because they know how to write good words all smart like, delaying the project, that’s a bike shed.
And when you’ve worked on a project for a month, finally crossing the finish line for just step one, and it’s all put into turn around because of button colors or placement of a link, that’s most definitely a fucking bike shed moment.
People delay projects because they need a grasp of control. Even though they don’t know how to build it, the can feel like they participated.
Cause what they do is fucking important.
I present Cisco, Head of Marketing, to sum this all up…