I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.

The mangrove forests of the Sunderbans in West Bengal, India are home to deadly Bengal tigers, which are easily able to kill a human. Yet hunters, woodcutters, and honey gatherers often enter these swampy forests. How do they protect themselves? Each person who enters the Sunderbans wears a rubber mask of a human face on the back of his or her head. The belief is that the tiger will only attack its prey from behind. If it can see your face, it will not attack. The masks, issued by the government, are part of a larger program that includes the placement of electrified human dummies and the construction of freshwater ponds to keep the tigers out of the rivers, where people are often attacked.

SPEAKING OF PASTORS... Ten pastors and ten youth pastors are going to a meeting by train. The ten pastors each have their own ticket, but the ten youth pastors (who have little money, of course) have one ticket between them. The pastors ask the youth pastors (in a caring manner), "How are you going to manage with only one ticket?" "Just watch," reply the youth pastors. They all get on the train and the 10 pastors take their seats and hand their tickets to the conductor. But the youth pastors all pile into a bathroom, and when the conductor comes by, a single arm reaches out and gives him the ticket. The pastors, feeling enlightened, decide to try the same thing on the way home, so they purchase just one ticket between the ten of them. The youth pastors buy NO ticket at all. "How are you going to get home?" ask the pastors. "Just watch," the youth pastors reply. When they get on the train, all the pastors pile into a bathroom. Nine youth pastors get into another bathroom. The tenth youth pastor then knocks on the pastors' bathroom door and says, "Ticket please." Out comes a single arm to hand over the ticket. The moral of the story: Don't use a technique unless you thoroughly understand the principle.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make is so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

A defendant in a lawsuit involving large sums of money was saying to his lawyer, "If I lose this case, I'll be ruined." "It's in the judge's hands now," said the lawyer. "Would it help if I sent the judge a box of cigars?" asked the defendant. "Oh no!" said the lawyer. "This judge is a stickler for ethical behavior. A stunt like that would prejudice him against you. He might even find you in contempt of the court. In fact, you shouldn't even smile at the judge." Within the course of time, the judge rendered a decision in favor of the defendant. As the defendant left the courthouse, he said to his lawyer, "Thanks for the tip about the cigars. It worked." "Well, I'm sure we would have lost the case if you'd sent them," said the lawyer. "But I did send them," said the defendant. "What?!? You did?" "Yes. That's how we won the case." "I don't understand," said the lawyer. "It's easy. I sent the cheapest cigars that I could find to the judge, but enclosed the plaintiff's business card."

Before going to Europe on business, a man drove his Rolls-Royce to a downtown New York City bank and went in to ask for an immediate loan of $5,000. The loan officer, taken aback, requested collateral and so the man said, "Well then, here are the keys to my Rolls-Royce." The loan officer promptly had the car driven into the bank's underground parking for safe-keeping, and gave him $5,000. Two weeks later, the man walked through the bank's doors, and asked to settle up his loan and get his car back. "That will be $5,000 in principal, and $15.40 in interest," the loan officer said. The man wrote out a check, got up, and started to walk away. "Wait sir", the loan officer said, "While you were gone, I found out you're a millionaire. Why in the world would you need to borrow $5,000?" The man smiled. "Where else could I safely park my Rolls-Royce in Manhattan for two weeks and pay only $15.40?"

According to an ancient Sufi story, a blind man wandering lost in a forest tripped and fell. As the blind man rummaged about the forest floor he discovered that he had fallen over a cripple. The blind man and the cripple struck up a conversation, commiserating on their fate. The blind man said, "I have been wandering in this forest for as long as I can remember, and I cannot seem to find my way out." The cripple said, "I have been lying on the forest floor for as long as I can remember, and I cannot get up to walk out." As they sat there talking, suddenly the cripple cried out. "I've got it," he said. "You hoist me up on your shoulders and I will tell you where to walk. Together we can find our way out of the forest." According to the ancient storyteller, the blind man symbolized rationality. The cripple symbolized intuition. We will not find our way out of the forest until we learn how to integrate the two.

The British economist E> F. Schumachker, best known for writing Small is Beautiful, argued (in his book A Guide For the Perplexed) that there are two fundamentally different types of problems: "convergent problems" and "divergent problems." Convergent problems have a solution: "the more intelligently you study them, the more the answers converge." Divergent problems have no "correct" solution. The more they are studied by people with knowledge and intelligence the more they "come up with answers which contradict one another." The difficulty lies not with the experts, but with the nature of the problem itself. If you are in Boston and want to travel by car to Albany, there is a right answer to the question, "What is the fastest route to Albany?" But there is no right answer to the question, "Why do you want to go to Albany?" Schumacher's favorite example of a classic divergent problem is: "How do you most effectively educate children?" Different people of integrity and intellect will, inevitably, come to very different conclusions. It is important to realize that divergent problems are not convergent problems that have not yet been solved. Rather, they are problems for which there is no single, best solution.

Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network In the course of a recent Microsoft Access programming project, we had three difficult technical problems where we decided to call a support hotline for advice. This article compares the two support numbers we tried: Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network. As a result of this research, we have come to the following conclusions: 1) that Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network are about equal in their ability to provide technical assistance for Microsoft products over the phone; 2) that the Psychic Friends Network has a distinct edge over Microsoft in the areas of courtesy, response time, and cost of support; but 3) that Microsoft has a generally better refund policy if they fail to solve your problem. In the paragraphs that follow, we will detail the support calls we made and the responses we received from each pport provider. We will follow this with a discussion of the features provided by each support provider so that readers can do their own rankings of the two services. Our research began when we called Microsoft regarding a bug that we had detected when executing queries which pulled data from a Sybase Server into Microsoft Access. If we used the same Access database to query two databases on the same server, we found that all of the queries aimed at the second database that we queried were sent to the first database that we had queried. This problem existed no matter which database we queried first. Dan called Microsoft's Technical Solutions Line, gave them $55, and was connected with an official Microsoft Access technical support person. As Dan began to explain the problem, the support person interrupted him, and told him that since it was clear that it was not just a problem with Access but with the two programs together, Microsoft would not try to help us. They did,however, have a consultant referral service with which he would be glad to connect us. Dan then asked if we could have our $55 refunded, since Microsoft was not going to try to answer to our question. The tech support person responded by forwarding Dan to the person in charge of giving refunds. The person officially in charge of giving refunds took Dan's credit card info again, after which Dan asked about the referral service. It was too late, however -- the refund folks could not reconnect Dan with the tech support guy he'd been talking with, nor could he put Dan in touch with the referral service hotline. End of Call One. Our second call came when Dan was creating some line graphs in Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access actually uses a program called Microsoft Graph to create its graphs, and this program has a "feature" that makes the automatic axis scale always start the scale at zero. If all of your data are between 9,800 and 10,000 and you get a scale of 0 to 10,000, your data will appear as a flat line at the top of your graph -- not a very interesting chart. Since Dan was writing Visual Basic code to create the graphs, he wanted to be able to use Visual Basic code to change the graph scaling, but he could not find anything in the help files that would tell him how to do this. After working with Microsoft Graph for a while, Dan concluded that it probably didn't have the capability that he needed, but he decided to call Microsoft just to make sure. Dan described his problem to the technical support person, whom we'll call Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob said he'd never gotten a call about Microsoft Graph before. He then left Dan on hold while he went to ask another support person how to use Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Bob came back with the suggestion that Dan use the online help. Dan, however, had already used the online help, and didn't feel that this was an appropriate answer for a $55 support call. Microsoft Bob didn't give up, though. He consulted the help files and learned to change the graph scale by hand and then began looking for a way to do this via code. After Microsoft Bob had spent about an hour on the phone with Dan learning how to use Microsoft Graph, Dan asked for a refund since he had no more time to spend on the problem. Microsoft Bob refused the refund, however. He said he wouldn't give up, and told Dan that he would call back the next week. Microsoft Bob did call back the following week to admit failure. He could not help us. However, he couldn't give us a refund either. Microsoft Bob's supervisor confirmed Microsoft Bob's position. While Microsoft Technical Support hadn't solved our problem, they felt that a refund was inappropriate since Microsoft Technical Support had spent a lot of time not solving our problem. Dan persisted, however, explaining that if Microsoft Bob actually knew the program, he would have been able to give Dan a response much sooner. The supervisor made no guarantees, but he instructed Dan to check his credit card bill at the end of the month. The supervisor explained that if Dan saw that the charge was still there at the end of the month,then he would know that he hadn't gotten a refund. End of Call Two. Our third call to Microsoft involved using the standard file save dialog from within Microsoft Access to get a file name and directory string from a user in order to save an exported file. The documentation didn't make it clear how to do this using Visual Basic code within Microsoft Access, and Dan decided to call Microsoft to ask if and how a programmer could do this. The technical support person he reached told him he was asking about a pretty heavy programming task. He cheerily informed Dan that he'd called the wrong number and advised Dan to call help for Visual Basic, not Access ($195 instead of $55). This technical support person was extraordinarily helpful in getting Dan his refund. End of Call Three. Stymied by our responses from Microsoft, we decided to try another service provider, the Psychic Friends Network. There are several noticeable differences between Microsoft and the Psychic Friends Network. Microsoft charges a flat rate per "solution," which is a single problem and can be handled in multiple phone calls. As described above, Microsoft may or may not issue a refund of their fee if they fail to provide a solution for your problem. The Psychic Friends Network charges a per minute fee. They do not offer a refund if they cannot solve your problem. However, unlike Microsoft, they will not charge you extra if they provide more than one solution per call. We decided to test the Psychic Friends Network by asking them the same questions that we had asked Microsoft Technical Support. We called them and were quickly connected with Ray, who was very courteous and helpful. Like Microsoft Bob, Ray quickly informed us that he wasn't fully up to date on the programs that we were working with, but he was willing to help us anyway. We started off with our first problem: making a connection from Microsoft Access to two different Sybase Servers. Ray worked hard on this problem for us. He sensed that there was a problem with something connecting, that something wasn't being fulfilled either in a sexual, spiritual or emotional way. Ray also identified that there was some sort of physical failure going on that was causing the problem." Do you mean that there's some sort of bug?" we asked. Ray denied that he knew about any sort of bug in the software. "Are you sure there's not a bug?" we asked. Ray insisted that he did not know of any bug in the software, although he left open the possibility that there could be some bug in the software that he did not know about. All in all, Ray did not do much to distinguish himself from Microsoft Technical Support. He wasn't able to solve our problem for us, and he wasn't able to confirm or deny that a bug in Microsoft Access was causing the problem. We then asked Ray our question about using Visual Basic to set the axes of a chart. Ray thought hard about this one. Once again he had the sense that something just wasn't connecting, that there was some sort of physical failure that was causing our problem. "Could it be that it's your computer that's the problem?" he asked. "Is this something that happens just on your computer, or have you had the same problem when you've tried to do the same thing on other computers?" We assured Ray that we had the same problem on other computers, then asked again, "This physical failure that you're talking about, do you mean that there's some sort of bug?" Once again he assured us that there wasn't a bug, but that he didn't know how to solve our problem. "I sense there's some sort of sickness here, and you're just going to have to sweat it out. If you'd like, you can call back tomorrow. We have a couple of guys here, Steve and Paul, and they 're much better with computer stuff than I am." To conclude our research, we asked Ray about our problem with the standard file dialog box." It's the same thing as the last one," he told us. "There's some sort of sickness here, and you're just going to have to sweat it out. There is a solution,though,and you're just going to have to work at it until you get it." Conclusions: In terms of technical expertise, we found that a Microsoft technician using Knowledge Base was about as helpful as a Psychic Friends reader using Tarot Cards. All in all, however, the Psychic Friends Net work proved to be a much friendlier organization than Microsoft Technical Support. While neither group was actually able to answer any of our technical questions, the Psychic Friends Network was much faster than Microsoft and much more courteous. Which organization is more affordable is open to question. If Microsoft does refund all three "solutions" fees, then they will be the far more affordable solution provider, having charged us no money for having given us no assistance. However, if Microsoft does not refund the fees for our call regarding Microsoft Graph, then they will have charged us more than 120% of what the Psychic Friends charged, but without providing the same fast and courteous service that Psychic Friends provided. Microsoft Tech Support (800) 939-5700 The Psychic Friends Network (900)-407-6611

The question “What shall we do about it?” is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once.

There's a problem in asking people to focus on problems.... probably the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die, but we don't have the technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems, the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.