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When you have other tools, but are too used to the hammer (self.chat)

submitted 1 year ago by elfpie to c/chat

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Lip balms here usually have a cap that you just pull to open, and that's what I had been doing with the latest one I bought. Several times in the several weeks since I first opened it, I thought it's really too hard an action. Today, maybe because I'm sick and weaker, I stopped to consider my repeated internal criticism and easily screwed the cap off.

So, I ask all of you to tell me of a moment when you realized that hammering a problem was not the best solution.

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[–] Ix9 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can’t take credit for this one, that goes to my brother:

He once tried to smoosh a house fly with a literal ball peen hammer. Suffice to say, the fly dodged with ease, the glass window it was sitting on not so much.

[–] SamVimes 6 points 1 year ago

When I was <5, I was a firefighter for Halloween. Apparently my mom wanted me to stop bothering her and she told me to go fight a fire. Apparently plastic axes can break windows, at least thin ones on a greenhouse. That is what firefighters do though...

[–] SamVimes 5 points 1 year ago

Second tangentially off topic reply by me, but hey, it's chat.

Something I encounter more often is rather the opposite. When people come to you with problems, (especially technology related, but it fits all types) it's often "what's the solution to this weird specific thing?" and that weird specific thing turns out to be a result of them being part way through solving a problem their own weird way, because they neglected to consider the hammer situation.

In your case I'd be like if you asked me for skateboard grip tape to attach to the cap because it's too hard to pull off.

A good technique is to do what you did, recognize something might be wrong here, and try re-understand the original problem, feel good about recognizing it, not foolish for misunderstanding at first.

[–] blindsight 4 points 1 year ago

I worry that I do this in my Excel sheets.

I've figured out a set of formulas to filter sheets by specific content, identifying the rows using IFs, then using INDIRECTs to pull the values. I should probably just be using Excel's integrated filtering tool, but I haven't bothered figuring out if you can do complex filters with formulas, and with how easy it is to maintain going forward.

So I just keep hammering away, cluttering my spreadsheets with lots of "helper" columns to slowly filter down my results one layer at a time.

Or, really, I should probably be using databases for most of these things.