“A good workman never blames his tools.” That’s how the saying goes anyway!
I may not always like the work i have to do, and there is a time in everyone’s working lives when they feel a little less motivated than usual about the promise of going into work to do what they have been doing fairly repetitively for the past months. I do, however, take a whole lot of pride in what i do and i aim to achieve the best results possible with the tools i have. I rarely complain and I don’t mind working with whatever i’m given. You could, i suppose, call me a resourceful kind of guy!
Every now and again i seem to spend a few extra hours at work, because of my tools. Take yesterday as an example: I spend all day working on a set of presentation boards only to get two hours of printer problems when the printing of three presentation boards at A1 should take no longer than around 20 minutes. when i look at the printer booklet it turns out that the A0 plotter was actually made in 1998. This could explain the lack of printing speed, precision, quality, clarity and also suggest a reason why it won’t print a 100 meg file. The printer was built when the average computer used a Pentium 166 processor, and was powered with a mere 16 megabytes of Random Access Memory. So my tools, in this case a ancient plotter, aren’t really broken but in need of some serious updating. Believe it or not, I know of no system where my employer checks staff computing equipment, peripherals, hardware or systems.
The moral of this story then: A good worker won’t blame his tools unless they come with a power cord and a network interface…
