What Do You Think?
Today, I was deeply honored to access my ten millionth opinion. I know I started off slow. Originally I listened only to family opinions “Don’t play near the drain, you will drown”. By the time I was five I had probably listened to around 5,000 opinions. Then I went to school and listened to teachers who all said that they were teaching me facts, but a lot of it sounded like opinion to me. How could they know Elijah was fed by the ravens? They couldn’t have been there. And they told me that Britain had won the Second World War. Aw come on! Who’s gonna believe that?
By the time school was over I had listened to around a hundred thousand opinions.. Then I went to work and it seemed EVERYBODY had an opinion that quality was critical and that British manufacturing was going to turn around, and that I needed to learn SPC and Six Sigma to be the best in the world. After a few years I started having opinions of my own, but that didn’t seem to stop other people having them,
It didn’t seem fair. My manager had them, My customers had them. My girlfriend — and her family had them At this point I was up to a million opinions, and I was getting confused. So I started playing with academics, They did research. Surely they wouldn’t have so many opinions. Wrong!!! Some of them had hundreds! And they often contradicted each other. and themselves.
Then I became a Chief Examiner for a professional institution, and there another opinion explosion happened. All the other examiners had opinions. And if the students opinions differed from the examiners, God help them. two million opinions.
So I transferred into technology as the wave of the future, And guess what — more opinions! “Rails is great” “Rails doesn’t scale” “Play is the best library for Scala” “Use Groovy” “Use Node” “Meteor JS is better than React JS yada yada yada. By this time I am getting a bit better at opinions. I listened, nodded respectfully and ignored them. Five million opinions.
Thought I’d got it sorted. I already had a stats background. And although I knew that the only way you can confirm a parametric statistical test was with another test, but I thought that that would be that. Then stats turned into data science and I applied it in logistics and SCM. Six million opinions
Then I heard about social media, and the opinion storms that I had thus far endured were as nothing to the monsoon of opinion that fell from these platforms. So today, thank you to Ms. M________ for being my ten millionth opinion. It is a landmark which I shall never forget.
Thank you for reading…and if I could just ask- what’s your opinion?
