Yesterday, while preparing my rice noodles, tuna and sweet-chilli sauce for lunch, I realised I had misplaced my fork. And there were no other forks in the lunch room drawers.
Blast. “Oh well”, I thought; then grabbed a spoon and went and enjoyed the meal.
Once finished, I realised that, actually, the spoon hadn’t actually been that hard to use. In fact, it had worked well – better than I expected it would.
Then it occurred to me; if the fork had not gone missing, I would never have even tried using the spoon – believing it to be ‘not suited for purpose’ (to use a tech business term, if I may).
I made a mental note to blog about this wonderful thought – the inspirational missing fork – completely unaware that Don Christie (President, NZ Open Source Society) would make a similar comment today on the NZOSS Openchat list:
“..the idea that there are multiple platforms and options is as important as how to use an inidividual platform.”
Indeed, how often do we not even think about the possibility of an alternative being completely worthy of performing a given function only because we always had a ‘fork’ at our disposal.
The trick, I guess, is to look around now for an alternative before the proverbial fork goes missing (or becomes unavailable/unusable for some reason)….