Ever been engaged in a task, only to discover that for every part of the task you try to complete, two or more things become apparent that have to be done first?
So I was wrestling with a stairway today. Like the rest of the house, its old and run-down. Half rotten. My original plan was to replace two big posts that help hold it up. It looked like they were only sitting on the ground, not cemented
in as they should have been, which would be par for the course with this place.
Sadly, frustratingly, this was not the case. They had been cemented in, and then rotted away at ground level. I didn't find this out until I was a foot deep in the ground and my shovel snapped.
Then the various bits of superstructure began falling apart as I tried to take them off so I could get to the posts. The[[/ bits that didn't have a ridiculous number of nails in them, anyway. Then, on closer inspection, the landing at the top turned out to be a sort of wooden cat's cradle of supports underneath. All of which had to be detached from the posts to get the posts out.
But I don't tell you all this just to vent. No.
I actually made a couple of observations.
First, that simple observation of a problem isn't enough. Often - especially today - there are secondary, tertiary, hell, whole layers of problems beneath the obvious one(s).
Second, that Achilles can not only beat the tortoise, but then proceed to lay the smack down on Xeno by crossing all of the intermediate space at once. In the case of this project, I could have saved a great deal of time and energy by taking my Big Ass SledgehammerTM and knocking the thing down and rebuilding it completely from scratch.
