Your glasses are scratched

I recently scratched my glasses while mowing the lawn. I tried to remove a downed branch that had fallen from our large maple tree, but as I turned to toss it into the woods, one of the parts of the stick slapped me in the face and knocked my glasses off.

I put them back on and immediately noticed something on the right lens. I rubbed it with my shirt, but it didn’t come off.

Later I went inside and asked my wife if my glasses had a scratch. She took a close look and confirmed that the right lens was scratched.

The next few hours it was so obvious to me. It was centimeters from my eye! I was perpetually aware of this mar on the upper-left-middle section of my right lens.

Two weeks later, I almost completely forgot about it. A couple of nights ago I turned to my wife and said “Are my glasses still scratched?”

Of course, they were. But I had stopped noticing them. My field of vision had adapted to it.

The pain points that used to matter so much to us are quickly ignored and accepted as the new normal.

• The first time you had to manually adjust a parameter to deploy to new environments it felt painful. Two weeks later the manual step is a part of your routine you barely notice.

• The first time an analyst manually adjusted a formula to accommodate a new month in their analysis it was annoying. A couple of months later it goes without notice.

• The first time you opened up the executive dashboard and had to manually refresh the data and wait 3 minutes before you could view the numbers it felt like an eternity. Now it’s part of the process.

The nerds among us might call it “Technical debt”.

I like to call it just “friction”.

It’s everywhere.

Once upon a time you and everyone around you saw it clear as day. In less time than you expect, you wonder if that scratch is even there anymore.

You need an outsider to tell you, “yes”.

Your glasses are still scratched.

You should fix that.

Sawyer