Delayed

There are rather few things that irritate me. But among those that do, are news headlines about things that are delayed. News headlines are a category of their own, with the goal to manipulate readers or trick them to red a story that often has little substance.Actually, when it comes to sources of information, I've been on a continuous hunt for really good ones since the dawn of the Internet.

But back to the delayed. As an example: search the net for "777x delayed" and you will see a bunch of headlines. So delayed against what? The journalists' or the public expectations? The company is developing the most advanced passenger aircraft. This is not a repeat of what has been done a number of times in the past. So how can there be a fixed date against which the delay is judged? It is ready when it is ready. Simple. The "delayed" term puts a kind of a blame on the hard working engineers. Do we really want them to rush?

Speaking of things done repeatedly. I remember back in 2011 we were riding a night bus from Nazca to Arequipa in Peru. The departure was planned close to midnight and a friend of mine talked hard to a lady in the Nazca ticket office, trying to get the exact arrival time. "Madam," - the lady replied - "that bus comes from Lima. It left Lima at 3pm and it takes approximately 8 hours to get here. It is a long road and it may be lucky to get here earlier or may get here later than usual. There may be traffic jams and the driver will not exceed the speed limits to make up for the lost time.". I must say I really like the "southern" (as opposed to "western") approach. Fixed time tables make us all nervous.

All that "guaranteed", "quality of service" is a western nonsense. The world should be doing best effort. Try to be on time and deliver, but do not stretch, compromising safety or quality to make it on time. When everybody accepts that, there would be no "delays" and no stress.

This happened to me many times too. I remember during the development of Bluetooth Mesh 1.0 I was hearing so many times this had been delayed. Were we expected to ship a half-baked, low quality system instead?

Buses arrive when they do. Products are shipped when they are ready. Instead of committing to dates and hours, try to commit to priorities and quality goals. Things will be so much easier, for the benefit of all of us. And stress will be eliminated.