Life lesson revisited
As a child, blogger Danny Guo was playing in the garage and learnt a life lesson. "I went into my mum's car and put the seatbelt on (probably to pretend I was flying a plane). I realised at one point that I could still lean pretty far forward. Far enough that my head could touch the dashboard. How ridiculous! What's the point of the seatbelt if it doesn't actually stop me from going too far? I revelled in my discovery that seatbelts were useless. A while later, I pulled on the seatbelt quickly (a lot happens in imaginary aerial dogfights), and the seatbelt immediately stopped. An overwhelming feeling of stupidity hit me almost as fast. Nine-year-old me was not in fact smarter than Toyota engineers. If you pull on a seatbelt slowly, they'll extend to the full distance, allowing you to still have some range of motion. If you pull on them quickly, which is what would happen in a car crash, they'll stop quickly. Now whenever I'm tempted to judge something as stupidly designed, I try to check myself and remember my seatbelt experience. My rule of thumb is: My willingness to judge something should be proportional to how much I know about it."
Coincidence and folly
"In the distant past I had a monthly 'round the branches trip', which was a week away from home," writes Avi Modlin, Orewa. "As a result, the routine was to phone home around 7am each morning to stay in contact with the wife and kids. On one occasion, while in Cape Town, we had a busy day and a lengthy late-night review with the result that I was bleary-eyed when phoning home early the following morning. I dialled our home number (only fixed-line phones back then) almost automatically and the call was answered by a male voice. This certainly made me very much awake given the adrenaline surge and I asked: 'Can I speak to Marion?', which resulted in an enraged voice asking who the hell I was, which of course resulted in a rather acrimonious conversation. When we calmed down somewhat, I found I had dialled an incorrect area code and it so happened his wife's name was also Marion. We swapped names and I met them a few years later on one of my trips to their city and enjoyed a good laugh."
