Well, there are many things in my new position, short as it may be, that I wish I could write about, but I can’t. But I think I’ve found a way to express some thoughts in a way that won’t really reveal what I shouldn’t be letting out of the bag. So with that in mind, I can tell you that change is afoot at the University (big surprise eh?) and that change has been brought about by factors that are largely not something that could have been controlled by, or anticipated by the powers that be at the University (I know… I’m really shaking the ground). So what is going on?
Well, for the last decade or so, the University has been both doing very with Strike-well hammers, for those who forgot (or didn’t know about) the time when we as an institution tried to use the hammer to drive a wooden stake into a steel plate. That bad decision, even ten years on has left its mark. As there are many on campus that have a bad taste, or absolute hate on for Strike-well for what happened as a result of the wood/metal collision and have vowed to never use a Strike-well product again. Some have moved to Strike-wells other product, the Tack Hammer, while in hushed tones and lurking in the shadows, others have found and been using Acme Hammers. Now granted, not all the Acme Hammer users have been doing so in secret, rather the opposite, some have been loud and proud about the new way that they have found to pound a metal nail into wood. Occasionally they find nails that are a bit bent, but with a little TLC, they have made sure that those nails are driven home and get their job done. Some others, who can only envy Acme Hammers from afar see this as proof that Acme Hammers are the only way to get things done. But it seems to me that they miss the point.
The University has been using Strike-well and for the most part, they are used to drive metal nails into wood, sometimes soft, sometimes hard. But on occasion, they get used to drive screws into wood or someone tried to nail jello to the wall. For these instances and many more like them, Strike-well gets the blame, and to boot, the small team that is supporting Strike-well has to support a truckload of these hammers without knowing who or how they are being used – as opposed to the Acme Hammer teams of users and on site back-end support that are pretty much served up support on a precious metal platter should they need it as a result of their relevant ratios.
So has it been fair to lay the blame on Strike-well for not being as good as it can be, or for having issues when people try to do things with them that they were never meant to, or that there isn’t always support available for the users or the tools? I don’t think so. People seem to think that switching to Acme Hammers is going to change things and that all the ills of Strike-well will be erased. But I don’t think they understand. If we want to get rid of the baggage of Strike-well, we have to take a look at what worked and what didn’t in the old system. We have to see what part of the Acme Hammer support model can be extended across campus. And finally, we have to understand that once the truckload of Acme Hammers is delivered, there are still going to be people who will try to drive in screws and there may be something just as misguided as trying to drive wood into metal in our future.
So what am I cryptically trying to say? Well, I just hope people can see the difference between the tool in the showroom and the tool on the worksite as they are two very different environments.
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