Obstructionism

I ran into someone today who told me something “couldn’t be done.” Not that they’d tried thinking through the problem, fiddled with how to make it work, or actually implemented something toward that end. Simply that it couldn’t be done. I have a bit of loathing and disgust that comes out when I run into situations like this.

I’m reminded of a conference call when I worked at Chiquita. I forget what the end goal was for my transportation team, but we wanted the port to load trailers of fruit and I think hold onto it at the port for a while. What annoyed me was our port operations people got into a mindset of “we can’t do that” without having any good rational reason behind it. In this instance, I think we ended up dropping the line of reasoning on that call, and I asked my supervisor to escalate the problem up the ladder.

But, back to the earlier instance. Its something that the operating government agency really wants input on, and knows its a problem… Luckily I have some free time on my hands and access to the data so I’m going to go after doing some analysis, because I like this sort of stuff.