I’ve come to realize I have a kind of bifocal attention – solving today’s problem while simultaneously noticing the friction, which I can’t leave alone. I’ll stop in the middle of the task to write the script, the alias, the doc, the template. Not because I’m procrastinating the real work, but because to me this is the real work – the specific task is just today’s instance of a pattern I’ll hit again.
The instinct has a cost: it’s slower in the moment. The payoff is cumulative and mostly invisible – unless someone else sees my environment and how I work. That’s where the “wizardry” appears; One gesture suddenly seems to perform magic. Except it’s not magic, it’s just a lot of bifocal attention.
It’s an acquired taste to know when the improvement is worth the interruption.
So I was off talking about something, which was in fact a classic example of yak shaving. The person I was talking with is intimately familiar with the term. But in case you are not…
me: There was an old—sesame street maybe?—tv episode from the 70s or early 80s with a song, “There’s a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza…” that describes that sort of recursion. Decades earlier than yak shaving.
You’re absolutely right! “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” is actually much older than that—it’s a traditional folk song that dates back to at least the 1700s in Germany (as “Lieder von der Zithermädchen”). The English version became popular in the 1800s.
The song became widely known in America in 1961 when Harry Belafonte and Odessa Turner recorded it, and yes, it was performed on various children’s shows including Sesame Street in later years.
The song is the perfect example of circular dependency/yak shaving! The structure is that Henry needs to fix the bucket, but to do that he needs to sharpen the axe, but to sharpen the axe he needs to wet the stone, but to wet the stone he needs water, but to get water he needs… the bucket. It’s an endless loop of prerequisites that circles back to the original problem.
So you’re totally right—this concept of getting stuck in recursive task dependencies has been around in folk culture for centuries! The MIT folks just gave it a modern, absurdist name with “yak shaving.” The bucket song might be one of the earliest comedic explorations of dependency hell.
It’s funny how the same human experience—whether it’s 18th century peasants or 21st century sysadmins—keeps rediscovering this frustrating pattern and finding ways to laugh about it.
First — You can’t simply reply. I get it. It’s hard to have a mailbox on the Internet these days. So many bounces, to deal with (I’m serious.)
Second — So when you go to drag-select, copy and paste that “s.sampath@verizon.com” email address, you discover it’s not what it seems.
Pasting into your email client’s “To” field, you actually create a list of multiple recipients: The first recipient is “s”, then the second is “sampath”, etc—none of which are the email address you meant to copy and paste. So you have to type it into your email client. Not a big deal, but probably enough to stop most people. If they really cared, they’d just give us an
Okay, but why can’t we copy and paste? Because in the HTML source in their email, it’s actually:
If you can read HTML, you see there are HTML entities jammed in various places in that email address. I had to lookup the entity ‌ — that’s a Zero Width Non-Joining space. Meaning it’s not visible (“zero-width”) and it’s job is to keep whatever is left and right from “joining”… in the sense that complex characters can join to make a glyph— For example: An ‘a’ and ‘e’ can join to make the single character ‘æ’ if your language supports that. (But, of course, English does not have any joining characters at all.) I’m confident this is just an artifact of their bulk-email-sending composer software; it’s common for such things to “defend” an email address in the middle of text from harvesting looking for emails. So this wasn’t maliciousness on Verizon’s part.
Third — …but it’s ironic that, in a message that contains, “It’s not just better service — we are setting a new standard, beginning today,” I have to flip between windows as I retype that email address.
Fourth — Because I’m a level-39 nerd wizard, I do reply to these things. (I mean, I start a new email message addressed to that email address.) And because we (said wizards) are quick to anger and regular Internet users (ie, Sampath) are tasty with ketchup, I send things like this…
Being quiet and slowly building mastery and expertise doesn’t pay off much at first. So many creatives must make a calculation: Do I want the short term, could-go-viral-at-any-second thrill of being a vocal expert in my field? Or am I more content playing the long game? More people are incentivized to choose the former — and it’s getting crowded in here.
This is closely related to the bit the other day from Offerman. In fact, it’s closely related to anyone’s journey of self-discovery. It is directly related, and critically important, for creatives to understand the trap of the idea of there being a possible short-term payoff. There is no short-term payoff. It exists, in the same sense that car accidents exist: Yes, but we don’t hope for that. We don’t set out trying for that.
…and then it goes on, CAPSLOCKed, for several paragraphs. The only thing better than math-nerds, is when a math-nerd who is also a reason-nerd stomps on the vanilla-variety math-nerds. This stuff? This stuff makes the world a better place.
