View From the Bushes

A day or two before the book sale I was thinking, "I really need to track down a copy of Parkinson's Law," but in the context of "I should order a copy from Amazon." It never occured to me that I might be able to find a copy at the book sale. But I did, and not even in a location I would have thought of looking for it. For some reason it was shelved in the humor section. I also managed to pick up Churchill's six volume history of World War II in hardback for $15. Overall, it was a pretty good book sale. We ended up being second in line, behind a guy who showed up an hour and a half before us at 4:30. Now that's hardcore.

Anyway, more about "Parkinson's Law." One of my favorite chapters from the book talks about how the amount of time discussing an expense is inversely proportional to the amount of money being spent. I saw this principle in full force during a meeting of the "Web Advisory Board." One of the items on the agenda was a question as to whether we should renew some domain names that we weren't currently using but might eventually use. The cost of renewal for all of the domain names was around $50, and yet the question of whether to renew them occupied 25 minutes of time in a committee that had two executives, three upper-tier managers and a dozen other people whose average salary was at least $20/hour. As you can probably already deduce, the cost of the discussion was much greater than the $50 we would have to spend on the renewal.

I didn't get a chance to blog yesterday, mostly because I spent most of the day driving to and from the site we've selected for the family reunion I and my sister are suppossed to be in charge of. I had a little bit of a scare on the way back when a deer decided to make his break for the other side of the road just as I was approaching. Fortunately, I'm a much better driver than I once was, and I slammed on the brakes to shed as much speed as possible and then at the last moment let go of the brakes and made a quick, hard turn to the right around the butt of the deer. Of course I wasn't thinking "shed as much speed as possible, okay now release and manuveur," but my instincts were good and I guess that's what matters.

As an important side note, given how low my car is to the road my guess is that on a direct hit of the deer I would end up undercutting its legs and sending the bulk of it's mass straight through the windshield and into my face. This potentially fatal outcome did not occur to me until this morning, which is probably good. Had I been able to visualize this outcome just as the deer emerged from the forest, my guess is that I would have been overcome with terror and ended up doing exactly the thing I feared.

Small cars and deer don't mix
Ross