A group of us had just finished an excellent dinner and were now deciding what dessert to eat. Everyone was laughing and talking at once. Except for one person. One person who had, moments before, been joking loudly, fell silent. She sat very still. Her husband noticed and turned serious. “We need to leave now“, he said, and they left. The rest of us paid for our meal and moved to the exit on foot and on wheels. The silent woman and her husband were already farther down the sidewalk heading back to their hotel. I was shocked at what I saw. To me, it looked like the man was walking beside a stiff, wooden figure. The figure was not the sporty, active person I had met a few days previously. This was a person possessed. She was possessed by the pain of fibromyalgia right in the middle of having…
4 CommentsYear: 2012
100 years ago, a man wrote passionately about the incompetency that led to a terrible tragedy. The freshness of his words struck me when I first discovered them in 2001. Today, on the 100th anniversary of that tragedy – the sinking of the Titanic, I thought the words of that man – Thomas Fleming Day – were worth repeating. The Open Library makes it possible to do so. When I read this 1912 article in 2012, many questions come to mind. How are we designing today? How do we communicate simple safety procedures? How do we conduct training? How do we shoulder responsibility at all stages of a project? (As an uncomfortable parallel, read D.A. Winsor’s IEEE PCS article from 1988 called “Communication Failures Contributing to the Challenger Accident: An Example for Technical Communicators” (link opens PDF).) We are supposed to learn from past failures. Is that happening, or do…
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