who moved my cheese? the age old question of quality versus quantity is much more of a reality when you're faced with making decisions that actually affect, amazingly enough, quality and quantity. for example, at my father's flute factory you could either increase the base wage to improve quality or decrease the base wage but offer higher incentives to create quantity -- applied to the factory line workers, of course.

the problem is that the more you paid on flute parts made, the more chance there is that those flute parts are hastily, and shoddily, created. it was like an economics class come to life. increase commission on each piece made, get quantity, decrease quality. increase base pay, decrease commission equals better quality flute parts but also lazier workers. finding that happy medium was the challenge in running a factory floor. it was always about balancing efficiency with quality.

i think, as you head out into the working world, people figure out if they're cut out for one of two things. there are the types of people who can take a single task (or a few tasks) and be content to hone those tasks to perfection. they hammer away until they can be as efficient as possible. each minute of each day can be carefully coordinated to yield the most product. the other type of person finds no innate joy in constantly trying to beat previously established benchmarks for efficiency. they'd rather try to help the whole be efficient, as opposed to actually challenge themselves to be individually more efficient.

the comparison i have to make here is between worker ants, and um, manager ants? worker ants are happy toiling away day after day doing the exact same thing, but perhaps better each time. the manager ant want to be faced with different problems each day. they want efficiency challenges that aren't repetitive by nature; perhaps involving figuring out how to get around a leaf to the target object one day and then how to prevent worker ants from wandering into chemical traps the next.

bees might work better as an insect parallel. i'm not sure. it's late. regardless of the analogy, i'm clearly of the latter persuasion. i can't make myself be more efficient each day just to become a better worker. at a certain point i just decide "okay, this is as efficient as i want to be. i'm done here. 80% efficiency is darn good enough." i'm not sure this is the best of attitudes to have in a work environment. you really have to admire the people who can sit there, put their heads down, and grind it out. the peopel who are, you know, not me.