Why programmers aren't the most efficient trip planners

Earlier today, I had a pretty typical experience. I picked something up and was heading toward the kitchen with it. Along my way, there were several other items that all needed to go there. I went straight to the kitchen, then came back and made 4 subsequent trips to pick up all the remaining items that needed to go into the kitchen.

See, here's the problem. The instinct to simply get something to work first, and then refactor it to make it more optimal later is so ingrained in me, that I pretty much do that in life too. So here's how this works:

My wife's trip optimization:

• Decide that she needs to go to the kitchen
• Use Terminator T-1000-like optical scanning techniques to locate, identify, and prioritize all kitchen-bound items between her and the kitchen.
• Mentally perform derivitive calculus to determine the smallest rate of angle change possible in order to obtain all items with minimal wasted movement
• Go to the kitchen with 300 items piled to the ceiling
• Priorize the items in the pile by the desired destination within the kitchen
• Unload flawlessly
• Wonder why the hell a man can't do this...

My trip optimization:

• Locate the kitchen
• Go to the kitchen
• Forget that there was something I was supposed to bring
• Go back for said item
• Go back to kitchen.
• Repeat single-item fetch and return process until all 300 items are in the kitchen. This takes 300 trips.
• Decide that there might be an opportunity for refactoring
• Refactor one step in the system to be more efficient, resulting in 298 trips the next time.
• Repeat until I'm down to 1 trip, which causes me to make 300 factorial trips
• Wonder why the hell I can't do this right the first time...

Now I realize that my mind is far more scatterbrained than most, so my situation might be a little extreme (and I'm exaggerating because I think it's funny), but I have noticed a correlation between minds that are trained to break complex tasks into small ones (programmers) and minds that can take a hojillion little steps and turn it into a single trip (wives) and how efficiently (or inefficiently) those people go through their daily lives.

Is this something that happens to other folks, or am I really just completely hopeless and alone in my absentminded professorness?

tags: humor  

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