Lesson Plan (Project Management To You Academic Types)

Ever figure out when something is your fault? When I make my one mistake a year, I capitalize on the mistake to review my actions over the previous months to see if that mistake exhibits a "tip of the iceberg" behavior. You know what I mean. You're inspecting a person's uniform and notice an Irish pennant, pull on it and it's the zip cord for the rest of the person's outfit, which unravels as you keep pulling.

Well, I made a mistake a few years ago and have finally figured out that the mistake I made caused this whole economic mess. Yes, I admit it. This repression-fading-into-a-depression started because of me.

You see, many years ago, after getting frustrated with the country cable television service my wife and I received (20 channels, including shopping networks, religious networks and country music networks, none of which my wife or I frequently watch, leaving us little more than the over-the-air networks we could get for free), I gave in to the advertising for satellite TV and bought a DirecTV system made by Hitachi. I could walk to another part of the house and find the product number for the Hitachi system but I won't. Instead, I'll tell you it was the first-generation DirecTV product made by Hitachi. To say the system was prone to shutting down or locking up would give the electronic pizza box more uptime service credit than it deserved. If the unit got too warm (often after just five minutes of use while sitting out by itself, with no other heat source nearby), the GUI would freeze. Weeks of calls to Hitachi's technical support service taught me all the logic flowcharts they had developed to address customer issues, including mine.

"Hello, Hitachi. It's the not-yet-angry customer calling."

"Oh, hello, Mister Customer, sir." [translation: Oh no, it's him.]

"Look, my system's locked up again and I was wondering if any of the previous steps you've read to me repeatedly had been modified by your field engineers or support engineers because the last one you gave me, standing with one leg in a bucket of ice while holding the Hitachi box in the freezer pointed toward Polaris on the night of a new moon, doesn't seem to work this time."

"Let me look." [translation: I'm sending a desperation email to my supervisor.]

"Well, while you're looking, I'm going to take a hot shower 'cause I can no longer feel my body and my wife says my face is bluer than blue. She's afraid my face is going to start calving like a glacier. Oooops, there it goes. My ear and sidejaw just slid off my face. Sorry. Gotta go!"

After months of enjoying the multivarious satellite TV channel selections for two- to three-minute spans, I'd had enough. Up until then, I had avoided going to DirecTV's on-demand movie service because I didn't feel like paying full price for TV commercial sized slices of movie watching. Finally, while experimenting with the latest firmware update I'd downloaded from Hitachi via the phone line, I discovered a trick. If I turned on the receiver, set it to a movie channel and did nothing else with either the remote control or the control buttons on the front of the receiver, I could watch a movie all the way through without the unit locking up, as long as the phone line was disconnected.

Let me repeat this for those of you who don't understand how DirecTV service worked (and maybe still does). I could only watch movies from DirecTV as long as the phone line was disconnected. Well, you see, there's a flaw in that setup. DirecTV tallies your monthly bill by checking the satellite receiver for any "extra" services you might have used, including on-demand movies, special events, etc. The only way DirecTV can check your receiver is by "calling" it via the phone line once a month. How can it check your receiver if it's unplugged from the phone line?

That's what I call an unintended lesson plan. Or maybe just the dumb luck of my personal habit of taking things apart and testing how they work. In any case, I had figured out that DirecTV didn't need my system to be hooked up to the phone line after all.

And that's why the economy is in such a mess. Over the next moon cycles, I watched several movies. I watched them but never paid for viewing them. I set the tone, the mood, the desire for knowledge to be free, starting with me.

After figuring out the fault in the system, I decided I didn't want to keep tempting myself, so my wife and I switched over to a newer cable TV system available in our neighborhood (30 channels!). With the switch, I put the Hitachi receiver aside and forgot about it until yesterday while I was looking for holes chewed in the house where squirrels and raccoons are getting into the attic.

As I thought about the methods for keeping large-sized rodents and small-sized bears from sharing my domicile, it dawned on me that I had shown similar traits for tunneling into someone else's domicile when I watched satellite TV movies for free. Just as I don't want too many creatures tearing my house down, I don't want too many freeloaders tearing the economy down.

Thus, as soon as I can dig out the Hitachi box and hook it up, I'm reconciling my outstanding bill with DirecTV. At the same time, I'm going to patch up the holes in my house to encourage Procyon lotor and Sciurus carolinensis to nest somewhere else.

Maybe fixing my last mistake will get the economy back on track. No, forget about "maybe." I KNOW it will. Hey, maybe you've made a mistake like this, too, and can help me?