Glossing Swine

There's this one parking lot I walk through on my way to work each day. One morning I discovered that the blacktop elves had been hard at work the night before resurfacing the lot. They weren't able to finish, however, so I could tell that they simply laid a very thin layer of new blacktop on top of the existing surface. They finished the next night, and now the parking lot looked brand new.

Well, it did for a day or two anyway. Then the pebbles and rocks embedded in the tar started popping out, leaving holes behind. Now it's not in much better shape than it was before the resurfacing.

In a previous job we called this sort of thing "putting lipstick on a pig". We weren't talking about resurfacing parking lots but rather the unfortunately common practice some companies seem to have of slathering ritzy new features on top of a creaky foundation in the hopes that users won't realize that none of the important things have changed. In the case of the parking lot, it sure looks all shiny and new, but a closer inspection shows that the shininess doesn't really even go skin deep.

One of my guiding mantras is to always pursue quality, not quantity or speed. I find that going a bit more slowly and taking the time to do things right ultimately lets me go faster and accomplish more. Stripping and completely resurfacing the parking lot certainly would have taken longer than just reoiling it did, but it also would have lasted much longer.

Quality really is Job Number One!

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink