DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’m jealous of Metcalf and Ohm and Boyle; they all have Laws. Occasionally I wonder what my law would be… something I’d be remembered for long after I’m gone.

Today I thought of a potential candidate. It comes from years of software development, throughout which I have frequently been faced with incredibly detailed, complex, sometimes self-contradictory functional specs that have to be boiled down, reduced to code and data storage, and put online right now. Here’s the law:

If it takes three days to explain, it will take three months to build.

Here’s a sample application of the law: If you want it done by next week, tell me about it in simple terms. You have ten seconds.

I don’t get too many of those 10-second requests, except for the ones that go, “You know that thing you built last week? Turn it off. I changed my mind.”

Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 09:53:49 +0100
From: lost and found
Subject: Second bag found

we have good news for you : as we were still waiting for reply from Athens the missing bag was found at Frankfurt. There are no more Baggagetags attached but accord. to the name label it must be yours. The bag type does also match.
We are going to fwd the baggage onboard LH454/01Oct to SFO.
Best regards from Frankfurt Airport

Uwe Prager

Ia is known for its sunsets. From the western edge of the city, visitors are afforded an unimpeded view of the sun dropping into the Aegean. The islet of Thirasia lays just south of west, poking an edge into the scene.

The Lonely Planet guide to the islands warns that by 7:00 PM, tourists crowd the westernmost sidewalk in Ia, jockeying for the best position from which to view the sunset. We found this to be true… we hurried there on our first evening to find that the rest of the city had already arrived.

We also found that many of the people there had been somewhat overexposed. Greece is as famous for its sun as Ia is for its sunsets. The fact that all the mini-marts in town have display racks of sun lotion didn’t apparently register with some of these (formerly) pale western Europeans.

Standing in a crowd watching the sun set did not appeal to us — as ironic as it might sound, we didn’t come to Greece to hang out with a bunch of German tourists. We left the lobster people behind and resolved, first, to find a table for dinner before the crowd rushed back east to fill all the best restaurants, and second, to not get sunburned.

Moving back east, we found a much better way to enjoy the sunset. The red light does wonderful things to whitewashed buildings. This is one of my favorite pictures.

By day, Ia (Santorini, Greece) is three shades of blue and one shade of white. Here are two of the blues in a characteristic Greek-islands photo, the blue-domed church. This is a landmark in the center of town, and it marked our way home; the staircase descending from here led straight to our apartment.

(Well, “straight” is not literally true; to find our apartment you’d have to know which of the numerous forks to follow. I went the wrong way somewhere 80% of the time, whether because I was unsure of my direction or distracted by the awesome sight of the caldera. I got much better at recognizing being off the path by the second day.

We only got really lost the first night, and even then we’d located the Blue Sky within a minute of realizing “we should have been there by now.” The town is not very big, and the long staircases are bookended by the shopping district at the top and the Aegean at the bottom. In between, there are only so many choices.)

The flags around the church were tied off on a building across the street, and remember that by “street” I mean “sidewalk”, not that the Greeks tend to distinguish — cars, scooters, donkeys, and people use all paths constantly and concurrently, the only apparent rules being that cars don’t fit down the narrow streets, and scooters don’t handle steps gracefully.

The picture illustrates what I found so appealing about the architecture: simple lines, clean shapes, solid colors, set against a flawless blue sky.

The third shade of blue is the sea, as shown in this somewhat random snapshot from one of the stairways in town, or this shot of yet-another blue-domed church. (They’re everywhere.)

The NYC staff of Olympic Airways is eager to help but ultimately ineffective. I’ve taken to tracking down my luggage myself.

This morning I called OA’s baggage tracking office in Frankfurt, Germany. The man there was immediately helpful; he dispatched a colleague to search the “baggage bond” warehouse at Frankfurt airport. Unfortunately there was no sign of our suitcases. He promised to continue the search.

(These actions should have happened four days ago, had OA/NYC taken any action other than blame Lufthansa. The man in Frankfurt said of my file, “Hmm, this file was closed on the 22nd.” His office had no idea the bags were missing.)

Then this afternoon, a sympathetic woman from Lufthansa’s baggage tracking group called to say one of the suitcases had arrived at SFO. (She’s sympathetic because she’s endured about six increasingly anxious voice-mail messages from me.) We should receive the suitcase Sunday afternoon, seven days after surrendering it to the staff at the Naxos airport.

One down, one to go…

In the meantime, I’ve replaced the $85 power supply for my laptop. Assuming I ever get the other one back, I’m going to send an invoice to Olympic Airways.