Intro - Heads up.. What follows is a minor adaptation of a case study from a book I’m writing on technical decision-making around opaque risk.. the objective of the book is to develop methods to recognize bad decisions and interrupt harm that might come from them. I’m pretty certain this topic will not be generally interesting to most visitors, but I also do know there will be at least a handful or so which are. It’s fairly long, but will perhaps shed some light on two significant departures to the selling method.. to be posted shortly. The high level focus of this note is a surprisingly general decision process that leads to abandoning the initial goal. I’ve been twice approached this year to help set up other boat owners with their own selling sites... blog (maybe)... market inventory... description.. and content that hopefully pulls visits, etc., and have also communicated with others considering doing it all themselves. I hope it might be useful those.
Three stories...
1. Time of death....... 290751 mi/21 yr - Goodbye to a dear old friend. Frame cancer. Toyota/Lexus is a great engine company, and less a total-car/systems company. Returned our Merc’ Sheissewagon sechs months early because of its dreadful reliability. Everything in the big-V8 category was max-lux, and everything someone (salesmen, owners, whatever) from the lux world says usually sounds New-Coke-stupid. The Merc spent 3 yr violently dragging my head out of my ass toward the reality of treating consumer products like military/life-critical designs... A designer MUST ardently avoid pointless complexity and maximize mission-worthiness. I was given an article by a sub-systems design engineer buddy at Chrysler about an engine.. UZ2-FE. Cast iron.. not the usual aluminum, and part of a chain of extremely well-regarded engines. A variant of the of the UZ2-FE family had been FAA-certified for aircraft use a few years earlier. The rest of the truck impressed me much less, but all that seemed fixable/tolerable: I ripped out the air bladders and replaced them with Bilsteins and springs out of an FJ. I Made the spring perches on my lathe out of Delrin. Ripped out the ludicrous electro-viscous shocks up front ($1500 each?) that zero people need, and went with plain struts. Spring 2021, I measured very close to factory compression on every cylinder I could reach in my driveway. The frame is unsafe now, but the engine and interior are in very good condition. Not one major or urgent repair over her life and it NEVER once stranded me/us. I picked a damn good engine, not because of the BS glossy brochure showing presumptively useless super-model yuppies pulling up to Spahgos (wrt page 1 of glossy, lux brochures... google POSIWID vs intent), but because of finally applying decades of systems/design skills I am ashamed I failed to apply to its predecessor thanks to one very regrettable assumption I made during one of my frequent work trips to Germany. Same reason it took me 18 months to hunt down Clock Work. The sheer hell and shame of owning that predecessor car actually bears a large measure of the responsibility for why I got my truck right. The only replacement I want is another well-cared-for 04/05, or a 90’s diesel Hilux with a standard transmission and hand-crank windows.
2. Water World – Imagine you’re dead asleep in a recliner (broken back/neck, twice each). And all of a sudden you hear multiple unfamiliar alarms coming to life and combining every few seconds from different places inside the house.. your blurry opening eyes lock on to your daughter sprinting at you with a panicked look on her face.. whereupon you quickly check for assumed home invaders behind her and glance in the direction of your closest gun. “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah water spraying everywhere!!” For the official record... not my preferred way to wake up. The water feed to the toilet tank had let go spectacularly, on its own.. like the oil pan on the generator.. and was whipping around spraying the floor/walls/ceiling, gallons quickly finding the many hidden holes in the floor and spreading down into the machine shop I’ve been building up and optimizing and enjoying for ~20 years. It travelled along overhead pipes/wires/beams onto half of everything. Machines I spent months restoring/building... machines in my extended family of relatives and friends forever.. not-inexpensive new machines.. 3 tool chests loaded with a curated collection of older/better (aka Lindy effect) tools left to me by skilled family and friends who were tool/die makers, mold makers, A&P’s, who did giant piles of real work including war work with them... ~1000# of metal stock and ~500# of wood. Racks of many chemicals, lubricants, adhesives, coatings, etc. Maybe 2 dozen in-process repair/restore projects including the Heathkit GR-64 originally built with my dad in ‘68. I think “the event” took out my fancy soldering station and hot-air rework. These shop contents need a space 2-3x larger to be efficient, but life becomes a sliding tile game when packed so tightly. Doing everything to get 20 years of that work environment put back to organized and mission-ready isn’t something that slightly interests me.. Haven’t been back in there in a >month. How this relates to this web site.. Reliability is a chief component of mission-worthiness. Failure of a 25-cent part you were relying on can end your machine(s), or you.
3. Last Straw Technology Fail Please enjoy this extremely positive email:
Sent to me May 12. Discovered by me by pure accident on June 18th, along with 41 other unseen emails in the trash of Clock Work’s public email account. During that month, I admit that I was expecting to get some compliments and probably spawn some interesting/fun discussion from the boat side of my life re: the oil-pan fix... 3 orders of magnitude below the guess-quote by one of the “experts”, and AT LEAST 3 orders of magnitude faster, with a sht-load of experience-informed certainty-enhancing engineering-think up-stream. And also pull in a few solid leads too, which generally follows a technically interesting blog post (why I do them). There was a short ~1-week burst, that then atypically went to zero. I contacted the gentleman immediately but he had just bought a newer/more complex 42 for just under $700k.
Catch-22 – The Yossarian Process: A general mechanism of decision to give up
I finally GET it! Boating is where insanity aggregates in some fairly critical corners. Thank God I finally got it. This kind of insanity can’t be killed... the only escape is to escape. Intolerable Means Intolerable. To explain further...
Remember the progression of Yossarian’s response to the incessant, seemingly-to-him random insanity that progressively fill his days... the most consuming and consistent flavor of insane appearing to be Cathcart’s exquisitely timed raising of the number of missions from 25 to then 35, to then 50, to then 80? As the finish line comes into distant view, mission by hellish mission.. for say 25, the next soul-crushing milestone.. say 35.. is glimpsed, and fresh terror begins again for you to enjoy on the march to 35. Initially, he seems to see the flow of insane acts as independent rather than connected events... mere aberrations of luck. Maybe the soaring density and amplitude of hell will finally ease? You can see that hopeful perspective start to erode once he knew about 35 missions, as he finally “gets” that it’s not stochastic (standard issue bad luck).. it’s deterministic.... i.e. scheduled!! That the number of missions will climb with no end except sweet death ---> More and longer exposure to new forms of harm and insanity you will never see coming, like getting shanked by Nately’s whore (Paul Simon? LOL... just kidding). Yossarian finally KNOWS The Suck WILL continue and worsen... he “gets” that there is no reason to even entertain the naïve rationalization that via his usual modes of thought that more crappy things will ultimately STOP trying to eat him. That that which he believes is not working, [sounding familiar yet???] so he better do something else big NOW. And then he hears Orr made it to Sweden!!, so, hey.. it worked once.. grab a survival raft and get your ass in the water now!! So, a rule that has been front and center the entire existence of this web site...
Anti- Systems Complexity Design Rule – If it’s not there, it can’t break‡
Corollary to above – You can’t be forced to fly an escalating number of missions... from Sweden‡‡
‡ i.e. Why Clock Work
‡‡ “But they’ll think you’re a traitor!” “Then I’d be a damn fool to think otherwise.” <-- do not forget that specific mode of thought.. “the moment you think you got it figured, you’re wrong."
You can find yourself in places or times which are new-to-you, and which at a glance even looks similar to the home turf that built who you are... but which can be bursting with concealed realities that are un-intuitively very different from the norms you understand.. Going in, your initial assumptions are disproven, one by one.. as with Yossarian. The insanity trying to eat him only expanded.. never a break. His only choices were continue to take it, or flee where it was taking place. Begin Irony: I was, literally, already thinking about and adding to my notes on “The Yossarian Process” in that technical decision book.. and that was right around the time the perfect sht-storm hat-trick described above was unfolding (esp #3). In the midst of trying to write about the influence of a bizarre, irrational, intolerable environment on an experienced decision maker... what I was writing about was actually happening to me. Right there... on the screen.. was the whole process from escalation of insanity to solution. So, supplement to preceding rule and corollary...
Restatement of above: You can’t get screwed by boat-ownership if you don’t own a boat. The sooner you execute, the sooner the screwings end.
Catch 42 – I (the guy typing this) am Yossarian
For me, boats and boating are fun, or mostly were... but elements of boat ownership essential to success turn out to be inconceivably and significantly different from business, technical services, ethics, the actual meaning of the term “expert” as practiced in every other corner and across decades of my entire life... the training/skills/experience/beliefs, business or technical, that got baked in from back to Project Mercury and up to right now. Thinking/reasoning/decision-making as practiced is too different. I’d further happily entertain that the laws of physics are at times wildly different (e.g. Love letter).
For the first ~2/3 of my time with Clock Work, I never needed boat mechanics, and handled everything myself.. until literally multiple weeks after it went on the hard for the last time. Throughout the purchase process and beyond, my 100% intent was to farm out everything, but when you have a truck full of tools and (formerly) a full machine shop, just why wait? On what I believed was my last day working on the hard prior to storage or sale, a final last second departure check that showed normal every other time since I bought it revealed the battery charger was suddenly showing anomalies and the generator oil leak made it’s dramatic debut.. the same engine room check I did the day before that showed nothing. Only unstimulated oil leak of my life. Prior to that.. no use of MSP’s (marine service providers) except for the plastic. Yes.. some non-fatal technical and business issues there, but in the end, frankly a non-critical function performed IMO only because everyone else does it. But the charger’s trivial.. my friend Doug and I would kill that. And for the first time 40 years after the fact, I’d get to try that Air Force (I believe) leak test training to use.. and then finish selling.
Got a new charger 99% swapped 2 days later.. but finished that ~11pm and didn’t want to half-ass connecting 12 awg wire to 16 with the wrong crimp connectors (see other blog for my opinion of the half-assed world of electrical skill/cultural practices near the ocean). Farmed it out by voicemail. TWO f’ing crimp squeezes and put the cover back on. ~$450 to squeeze a crimp tool twice. Four hr labor. Because I refused to half-ass the final step of a of a system repair at 11pm by using the 12-14awg connector into a 14-16awg connector I had. Fortunately, I was not also charged for the unfixable carpet stain in the saloon. And my neighbor on the hard shared “that guy was on your boat for 15 or 20 min”.
Maybe just that one guy was a slob and a cheat? Or perhaps he was just having a bad day and it’s my responsibility to suck it up. Or it was Casual Ethics Friday. Or... maybe Occam’s Razor just works. First draft of my own Yossarian cascade:
No personal use of MSPs --> Years pass --> On to the hard --> weeks pass -->
oil/charger --> begin good faith attempts to engage MSP’s
But I’m not so innocent... the whole time.. years.. of “no personal use”, one of the regular social interactions with boating friends was asking what MSP’s I might engage to do more ambitious jobs on CW. Across all those years, I got only one positive recommendation, and the entire rest of the pile only offered up negative to mediocre suggestions. THAT interval was my 25-mission milestone MY expectations were not yet violated, but I should have known better from other people’s experiences.. realized I was vulnerable... from the utter consistency of the comments. Looking back, my time as a boat owner should have ended at some point in my second or third season. I choked. So, more synoptic timeline is:
Consistent MSP non-recommendation + no personal use of MSPs -->
Years pass --> 25th mission --> on to the hard --> weeks pass --> oil + charger -->
begin good faith attempts to engage MSP’s: oil leak/charger-crimping -->
weak skills and customer-predatory biz practices --> Mission 35 is scheduled‡ -->
EJECT – EJECT – EJECT
‡ - "That's some catch, that Catch-42," "It's the best there is!"
But still...... not complete yet. At the front end, call it 35 years of business, engineering, and a seriously mechanical personal life all calibrating my expectations. At the back end, technology which is the functional equivalent of the automated monkey lasers in the core of the Wildfire complex.. TECHNOLOGY will just randomly wakeup and secretly screw you, if what you’re working at forces your dependence upon it, or on the continuation of the original behavior of a tech you adopted earlier. For Clock Work, the email failure.. uncommanded deletion of dozens of new messages (summer 2024, cf above) that connects you to guys who want to buy your boat.. or disables or just also zaps into non-existence big swaths of critical selling information on your web site.... photos.. descriptions (spring, 2022). And you won’t even detect it for months because who checks all the leaves of their sales site or their email’s trash everyday‡. [Editorial insert.. I’m proofing this note and here just after 1:35am, my web site vendor just sent me an email informing me I just exceeded my upload limit, when I haven’t uploaded anything for two months. F technology.] [Editorial insert #2.. Entirely separate tech fail... one of the photo albums of the interior suddently lost all of it's pictures of a section of CW. It'll take a few days to track all those down and repost them, because all of us are here to serve tech... not the other way round. Movie quote.. "To Serve Man... it's a cookbook!!"] BTW, notice I’m leaving covid out.
‡ - The “why” technology has become so customer-hostile and Tony Soprano-like heavy-handed is that’s been their escalating SOP since people dared to start protecting their personal information, valued 2-3 yr ago in a study in Europe at $600/yr. I’m not going to write any of my defenses here but it seems I have to talk to a large number of people to meet just one who undertakes even a fraction of the protective modes I do, or cares.
My use of the term “Yossarian Cascade” comes straight out of the book I’m writing.. it’s a means to use familiar terms to classify an experience of unavoidable and unpredicted progressive escalation of pointless unnecessary wretchedness and plummeting enthusiasm that delivers some poor bastard to an intolerable place. It describes at a high level a generic process, but not the individual case details that propel the process forward. So, now.. those details.. the “why” of my reaction.
Calibration of Expectations – Business I have decades of business experience with a tech company I founded in the mid 80’s to exploit some uncommon electronics skills I had. Co-founded a business owners study group in 1990 in which I participated in ~weekly conf calls until a few years ago... 8 owners of real companies, up to 9 figures revenue, seriously discussing every kind of business issue/tool with the common goal of building best-in-class products/companies. I’ve hired numerous trained, educated, technical sales engineers.. and trained in excess of a 1000 at a name brand tech company. Not used-car type salesmen. Not just order-takers. Consultive sellers who understand sales development and building genuine trust. I “get” business including marketing and selling, but not the brilliant idea to ever treat customers like prey. Frankly, that last one never occurred to me until I owned a boat.
Calibration of Expectations – Technical/mechanical Thanks to multiple instances of spectacular fortune going back to the time of the Mercury Program, every day of my first 50 years after age 8 took place under the unrelenting exposure to severely talented and motivated technical people. Engineering, machine design, mechanics, A&P’s (3000hr), IA’s, machinists/tool/die/model-makers, and world-class engineers/designers. A deluge of motivated scholars. I learned to “be mechanical”. To “make stuff”. To design stuff while avoiding harm (primum non nocere.. yea, designers too. Real designers.). I never relied on forums or GD YouTube to learn anything important. I collected a ridiculous array of skills, professional and otherwise. For fun. Literally, my favorite thing is the chance to dig into a new problem others consider unsolvable, or put what I’ve learned to work to help someone deserving, and perpetually on the lookout for new smart high-curiosity guys to hang out with. I “get” success and failure behaviors/qualities around fixing machines/etc. vastly more than most if you go by the hours put in.
“Disparities from Anticipated Outcomes” – Or.. the surprise-screwings that triggered my own personal Yossarian cascade. Those last two paragraphs describe two parts of my background which calibrated my expectations for what is reasonable in those areas going in to boat-ownership. I made good faith efforts to work with mechanics/techs and brokers from several weeks after it went on the hard and decommissioning completed. Every single increment of those efforts yielded outcomes that made it impossible for me to believe I was working with any sort of actual/real proficiency or professionalism or honest dealing. The overall impression I have from that whole mess is I wasn’t dealing with one single guy who does what they say they’ll do. <-- literally my top business mortal sin for >~40 yr. Nothing about the set of people I tried to work with at any point made their output even remotely a horse race vs the world I came from. And thanks to the years of friends and other boaters quietly sharing wholly unacceptable and frequently unethical experiences... no actual support for the idea the next guy will probably be better, i.e no rational reason to stick with being the thing that attracts/has attracted these outcomes... a boat owner. And again, I went into this FULLY intending to work with the providers.
A closing note about ethics and honesty – it should never, ever have to be said but those things matter. Wasting another guy’s heartbeats, just for fun, or to preserve some distantly possible optionality or whatever is just another kind of harm. If you intentionally or recklessly remove heartbeats off the END of someone’s life... that's murder. You pull them out of the MIDDLE, “oh.. sorry.. I got busy”. In this note, I’m specifically condemning the guys I engaged in good faith. Why do I keep repeating that? It's what makes f'ing business work. But one other thing is this... I’ve been all about stochastic analysis and decision since the 80’s. I GET that it is pure fact that every human characteristic (solution inputs) that determines/contributes to a decider’s success is distributed on the Gaussian... I KNOW this the way people who use math and physics use the word know. Multiple things typically have to combine to produce real world decision success... experience hours, training hours, skills, ethics, trait conscientiousness, etc. I KNOW the service population that I and my fellow boaters sampled to create the outcomes we experienced absolutely includes the kind of providers who work to produce skilled, ethical deliverables. I know I did not meet any of them, but the math says they’re out there. BUT, I could never afford the predicted number of heartbeats Yossarian-cycling my ass to meet them... but I absolutely would dearly love to get to know even one.
You know some things I never, ever, ever heard in that world I came from? “I smoke more pot than anyone in Rhode Island”. “Sure, I’ll sell your boat for 7%” (text) followed a few weeks later by “I have to sell your boat for 10%” after the selling season is over. “It really took 4 hours to squeeze the crimp tool twice”. “You don’t need a torque wrench.. after a while, you learn” shortly thereafter replying “what is bolt stretch?” “Honestly, I’ve passed your messages on 4 times and he said he’d call you back” Followed by some chit chat about being scared for her job because I’m not the only one looking for some GD communication. “I guess we’ll just pull the gen out of the engine room and see what we can see” and when asked what he thought that would cost, I heard “10-thousand give or take”. [A friend and I killed the leak for $16 in 3 orders of magnitude less time.] “I should be able to get to you next week”, uttered ~6 weeks earlier from when I fired him for not one single response to text, email and via-secretary questions also asking for some GD communication (this is different from the guy an inch or so up.) My first engine survey was written on a diner guest check and the oil sampling unacceptably careless. Stopping here for the mercy rule.. by no means for a lack of further examples.
"Screw em back?" - I’ll anticipate something that has come up in discussing the usefulness of MSP’s. From the time line, I had a concentrated number of negative experiences in the last half of 2023, but also sprinkled across the time it went on the hard. More than once, I was asked by friends some variant of 1. Why don’t you report them to BBB, or 2. Why not just call them out in online reviews, etc. 3. Why not call that guy back writing about "the dark side of boating" and say "yes" to contributing? Strong opinion on all that.. here goes... Based upon my direct personal evidence, I cannot help but hold that the caliber of most of MSP technical and business skill I have personally encountered is pitiful.. ditto the ethics they showed me. Not one guy I talked with would survive an afternoon working on my side of the fence. That sentence I just wrote down obviously indicates I think I’m better than the MSP’s I tried to hire, and with the exception of my body’s pitiful remaining functionality, I have zero doubt of that. So if you seek to operate as a high performer in life, an obvious question is.. what is useful about some half-assed variant of revenge? How is that remotely useful? Hint: It’s not. Some other good thing you could have been doing doesn’t get done because you went all high-school. If you value your remaining reserve of heartbeats, you don’t waste them on pointless/useless pursuits/people. I design/make/diagnose/fix things... ruining things is unproductive distraction for other people.
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