You know that thing plumbers do when they come to look at your pipes? That agonised head shake followed by the dreaded phrase, “I don’t know what your last plumber was doing mate.” He should have installed 10mm apparently, not these shonky 6mm ones.
Or when you get your car to the garage and the mechanic tuts, again with the agonised head shake. “I’m surprised you even got it here, mate.” While your heart is sinking, your head is filling with doubt about just how genuinely terminal this particular problem is.
Well I caught myself doing just this a couple of times recently. Having been asked to give my thoughts on websites that had been put together by others, I had a good look round, read the copy, considered the branding and so on. I logged into the admin area and looked at how it had been built, wondered if search engine optimisation had even been thought about and generally despaired with the dogs dinner in front of me.
I may have tutted. It’s possible that I did that thing where mechanics suck air in through their teeth before saying “it’s gonna cost ya, mate”. I came up with a raft of ideas and suggestions, and worried about telling the client how much this was all going to cost.
Now, I’m not so naive to think that someone else wouldn’t do exactly the same when looking at one of my sites. I imagine a beauty therapist would recoil in horror at hearing a new client’s skincare routine; an accountant would crush their calculator when confronted by books prepared by one of their counterparts.
We all do things differently. Some of us are excellent at what we do, some not so excellent. But we all create the finished product in varying ways.
So the next time an electrician vomits at the state of my wiring, I might just empathise. Right up to the point that he drops that quote-bomb.