Between the weather and work I'm not sure which one sucks more.

Not that anyone keeps up on this dialogue with myself but I was on vacation last week in the land of 1000 virgins. I actually do have quite about to write about it even though work has sucked all my life force, desire, passion, motivation, desire, passion, desire, you get the picture. I came to the maddening realization today about work and the product that I work on and granted this is probably not just a problem here at Sprockets but a problem with any company who tries to write a software application that can do everything without really having an idea about what that everything is. Think of our product as a Mr. Potato Head (MPH) and all of his bucket of parts, with buckets of fun for everyone. You know that children will want to play with it, add things to it model it in their own creative image that is sometimes logical and sometimes not. You take his body try to figure out every single place someone might want to assemble and accessorize MPH, you add the holes, and you plan the accessories that you will package with MPH and then you release it to the general public of kid normal. Now Hasbro or whoever makes MPH doesn't have to worry about feedback from customers, if a child wants to give MPH mechanized legs, a unibrow-brow, body builder arms, or a giant freaky phallus they don't have to go back and figure out how they are going to allow the kiddy to add these things. That is unless of course Hasbro gets sued in a class action suit because someone's child nearly dies after choking on a MPH ear.

So the product I work on is like a MPH, we planned it to have all these things you could do with it. It would be relatively easy to add things to MPH to configure him in any way that our clients would want, they want MPH to have one eye, a cowboy hat, one arm, no lips and two legs, fine we can do that. The problem for us is that the client comes back and says that they don't want MPH to just stand there, maybe they want him to walk, maybe they want him to talk, maybe they want to put a wheel on the bottom of him and have MPH soap box derby races. So what started out as a nice little modular system where most of the features we thought a client was going to want was there and other functionality could be added turns into a freakish post apocalyptic MPH that was melted from the radiation, has three eyes, 16 legs, scaley skin, the ability to think for itself, and maybe water your plants. I look at MPH and all I do is become disgusted like one would be if they were to actually look at a melted down radioactive infested freakish semi aware toy. I look at it and I get depressed because we are never going to take the time to go back and really try to determine what people want, or to rethink things all we were ever do is drill more holes onto MPH, melt existing lip accessories into frowny fanged grins and hack hack hack.

Enough of that, as time goes on my love for the Toyota Scion xB grows and grows too bad the response from everyone I generally talk to treat it as if it was some freakish dwarf like psychopathic clone with two different colored eyes. It's a little boxy, but it's got nice clean lines, and so what if it's a little under powered and may limp along like one leg is a little shorter than the other. So in my goal to "win the hearts and minds" of the doubting group that is my pears I figured a little media blitz with a revised picture of the xB may need to be in order. Isn't it cute? Don't you just want to walk up and scratch it's ears and watch it hope hop along the street sniffing flowers, eating clover and destroying your vegetables every chance it gets? I was thinking putting a baby seal picture on it's face however bunny ears seemed like a much better idea.