Man, “showed to”… that phrase really gets me thinking. It’s like, you spend all this time on something, you’re kinda proud, and then you put it out there, you know? You’ve showed to them what you’ve got. And then… well, then stuff happens.
I remember this one time, at a place I used to work. Not gonna name names, but things there were a real mess. We had this process, a weekly report thing, that was a total pain. Seriously, it took like half a day for everyone involved, clicking through ancient systems, copy-pasting stuff into spreadsheets, just a nightmare. Everyone grumbled about it, but nobody did anything.
So, me being me, I thought, “There’s gotta be a better way.” I spent a couple of my evenings and a weekend tinkering around. Wrote a little script, nothing too fancy, just something to automate a bunch of the stupid clicks and data pulls. Tested it out on my own tasks, and bam! What used to take me an hour was done in like, five minutes. I was pretty chuffed, I tell ya.
So, I Showed It To Them
Come Monday meeting, I was actually a bit excited. “Hey guys,” I said, “I’ve got this little tool, it might save us a ton of time on those awful reports.” I did a quick demo, showed to them how it worked. Click, click, done. Report generated.
And what did I get? Silence. Not the “wow, that’s amazing” silence. More like the “uh oh, what is this new devilry?” kind of silence.
Then the questions started. But not the good kind.
- “But what if the old system changes one tiny field?”
- “Is this approved by IT security?” (Mind you, it was just a local script handling data we already had access to).
- “But I like my way of doing it, I have my own template.”
- “If this is so easy, will they think we don’t have enough work?”
That last one, that was the kicker. It wasn’t about efficiency. It was about… I don’t even know. Fear? Inertia? People were so used to the grind, the idea of making it easier actually scared them. My little script that I so proudly showed to them, it didn’t solve a problem; it just highlighted a much bigger one: the culture was stuck.
It was a real eye-opener. I thought I was helping. I thought I showed to them a path to less drudgery. Instead, I just stirred the pot of their anxieties. The script never got officially adopted, of course. A few folks used it on the sly, whispering about it like it was contraband. Most just went back to their old, slow, painful ways.
I didn’t stay there much longer after that. What’s the point of trying to build better sandcastles when everyone else is perfectly happy playing in the mud, right? So yeah, “showed to.” Sometimes, you show ’em, and what you learn isn’t what you expected at all.
