Sarah and I went to her parents’ place yesterday for her sister’s birthday/delayed Fathers’ Day celebration.
After lunch, my FIL was watching something on HGTV. Essentially, other rich & famous would hire this soap actress and her musician boyfuck/husband (they got married while they were shooting the episode) re-do a room. Budgeting is sketchy. Even more sketchy is scope.
This guy hired them to do the kitchen. Perhaps the kitchen needed work. I don’t know. I didn’t notice anything wrong with it, myself, but I wasn’t there.
Regardless, they spent zero time doing needs analysis with the owner to find out what he actually needed or wanted to be doing in his kitchen. Boyfuck/hubby, in between clips of him playing guitar, made some changes.
Meanwhile, Ms./Mrs. Actress went about “fixing” the living/dining room adjacent to the kitchen.
That fireplace is a hole of darkness. It has to have a mantle.
Oh, let’s put up a chandelier, because this room is too dark when it’s not sunny outside.
Naturally, hanging the chandelier was a pain with a seriously vaulted ceiling, and no place to mount it.
Then the one she spent considerable cash buying wouldn’t fit — too big.
My question remains; how did this help Joe Homeowner make a grilled cheese sandwich?
Maybe he liked the living/dining room fine the way it was?
I talked to my my engineering grad student brother a bit about this this morning. IT is full of people like these folks who’ll change things up just on their own whims, not because something actually needs to change.
Sometimes the users’ whims come into play, but proper requirements development keeps you from buying a chandelier that’s too big. Or buying one in the first place if one isn’t absolutely needed.
All that said, I’m a bad person for thinking that way. That’s been communicated to me enough. Yes, I got the memo, Lumbergh.
Still, it’s important to remember that my own personal whim isn’t what matters, ultimately. Maybe I was hired to build a cooking space that is easier to clean up after butter spatters all over it. Maybe that left rear burner on the range isn’t working anymore.
I wouldn’t know if I didn’t actually spend the time to find out, and just attacked redoing everything just because I thought the old stuff was ugly.
*headdesk*
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