On The Train (Tired, Train, Rain, K Sharing), June 22, 2007

I was really late then the usual going home as I had to settle something important. I came out of the office with the rain pouring down on the tarmac as I walked out of the compound and stopped at the guard house to ask if they knew when the last train out of the station was. The rain and the mood at the station was damp as echoing my somber mood. I just sat there waiting with no interest what so ever to do anything. The works, issues and potential problems kept scrolling up and down in my mind.

It was the 2315 train to Seremban that I managed to board and I think was the last one. One thing interesting about the last train was that most of the commuters were workers, white or blue collars, calling it a day and going home tired. The faces were just like mind with the eyes constantly staring out beyond the train. It was really pouring hard outside when the train running between Serdang and Kajang. Lightning flashed behind me and sitting with my back to the window I could feel the rain on my neck. Imagining it I could see the head of the train with its headlight only managing less than 50 meters breaking through the pouring rain. If I could just stand outside looking at it I would have loved it. I guess rain and train are my things.

While busy trying to finish something important we realized we made two mistakes. They were small mistakes but the potential impact is major. I do not wish to talk about the mistake per se here but more as the human behaviour of how the mistake can happen. When someone in a familiar territory or has been doing something so many times that it became second nature to them they tend to look it at a glance and their mind would straight away say yes, correct or things like that to declare the things they see as the truth. In our case the document that we had been working on took shape overtime and after each draft we put more confidence on the content to be right and blinded by the fine print. One of the best ways to mitigate this is to get somebody not familiar with the document to read it. This got me to thinking when someone argue that they do not have anything to share they are basically saying that they assume what they know has no value because they are too deep into it so much so decided it to be so simple and common sense and not worth sharing. They need to share it anyway as the third party listening to him would understand it differently and certainly triggers different perspective. This means the different meaning would leads to creating new set of knowledge.