Not Someobody Else's Problem - Mine.

What is the first thing that occurs to you when you encounter a problem? Or something breaks down? You search, you discuss on mailing lists, you read source code. Basically, you use all the resources you have the liberty to use. What you don’t do is accept the problem or dynfunction or break-down as a norm and build your life around it.

However, there are also those things that we use on a daily basis and which don’t provide us this respectful liberty to learn or fix or extend things. These “things” could be hardware or software or services or systems. Often, given our constraints of time or patience and so on, we just cover up these things with a “SEP Field” and go on with our lives.

Now the “SEP Field” is a fantastic device to use. It enables us to create blindspots where we would otherwise see problems. By eliminating the awareness of the problems, we also do away with the itch to solve them.

What’s an SEP Field? It was invented by Douglas Adams in the book Life, the Universe and Everything as a sort of “cloaking device”:

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