Hedtke's Law #12

I should've remembered this one ages ago. I think I started saying this in the early 80s if not before. I don't know where it comes from or if I coined it, but I've never heard anyone else say it, so it's mine now! mwahahahahaaaaaaaaa!

Hedtke's Law #12: Life is like a rose bush. Enjoy the flowers and ignore the occasional prick.

Hedtke's Law #12

Hedtke's Law #11

Hedtke's Law #11 is something that probably should go much earlier in the list, but it's one of those things I just thought of when I said it, so #11 it is:

All things being equal, it will always take longer.

This is something that I'm sure other people have said in similar ways, but I'd like to record this here and now for whatever it may be worth.

Hedtke's Law #11

Hedtke's Law #10

The latest addition to the list:

Hedtke's Law #10: Trying to figure out 'crazy' isn't going to make any sense to you if you're not.

Hedtke's Law #10

Hedtke's Law #9

Here's another of Hedtke's Laws:

Hedtke's Law Number 9: Life is so much easier when you have no shame.

For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

Hedtke's Law #9

Hedtke's Law #8

Something Avi Hein said this morning on Twitter reminded me of another Hedtke's Law:

Hedtke's Law Number 8: Never make it hard for your customers to give you money.

For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

Hedtke's Law #8

Hedtke's Law in Latin

Hedtke's Law (about which you can read more here) is now in Latin, thanks to Dr. Sarah: 

Quod neminem laedit neminis interesse potest.

("That which offends no one is able to be of interest to no one.")

For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

Hedtke's Law in Latin

Hedtke's Laws -- add'l

(If you haven't already met Hedtke's Laws 1 through 4, check them out here.)

Hedtke's Law #5: Avoid doing business with fundamentalists.

Comment: This isn't about any particular brand of fundamentalists--it's not like I'm saying "You shouldn't do business with fundie Christians, but fundie Shi'ite Muslims are okay." It's about any kind of fundamentalist: Christian, Muslim, Scientologist, whatever. They're non compos mentis by definition and it's bad form to do business with people who are crazy because you can never be sure if they understand the terms of the deal, or if they won't come to a new interpretation of what they're going to do (or more likely not do) because their God told them it was okay. Identifying if people are crazy enough to put them on the Index is not always possible before the fact, so you do what you can. If they are crazy enough, back away slowly and smile.

Hedtke's Law #6: I know it's not perfect, but it's Thursday.
I knew I already had a #6 and this is it. This was developed in response to an employee who kept banging on me about how our manuals could be better. Sadly, my writer had a hard time figuring out that what we were doing was first and foremost a technical writing job. She used to bitch me out about what she’d call my "freelancer’s attitude" and would go on at some length about how the manuals could be better if we worked on them longer. I never disagreed with her--after all, they could be better than they were, particularly if we were given time to do so--but we didn’t have the time and it was my distinct experience that the audience we were dealing with probably wouldn’t notice the difference if we did. (We were still getting a 92% “meets or exceeds customer expectations” rating from independent market surveys, so killing ourselves to make that additional 8% just didn’t seem worth it for the amount of work.)

In response to this harangue about quality, I finally developed Hedtke's Law #6, which said that whatever we might do to make the manual better, our deadlines were the most important thing. If we didn’t ship the manual on time, after all, we’d get beaten up for it. If we didn’t make our deadlines often enough, we’d all lose our jobs and then we could take consolation in being on the moral high ground as we looked for another job. Furthermore, I said, if we weren’t given the resources, the time, or the prior planning necessary to create perfection, then I wasn’t going to beat myself or the team up to solve someone else’s problem. I preferred sleeping and I wanted the team to do as much of that as they could, so I wasn’t planning on ordering everyone to spend extra time on polishing something that wasn’t going to see more than a few hundred copies sold, ever. This was not Great Art, this was just pushing writing out the door for pay.

Hedtke's Law #7: Too much rigor produces rigor mortis.
This one isn't mine, either. It was a comment in the intro to my physics textbook in college, probably about the only thing I remember from it. It was an excellent description for a good approach to teaching.

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I'm sure there will be more laws as I recall them, but they don't come to mind until I actually have occasion to use them, when I write them down here so I'll remember them in the future.

For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

Hedtke's Laws -- add'l

Hedtke's Laws

It occurs to me that I've quoted these frequently but never codified them. So here are my rules, or at least the ones I can remember on the fly. There are more, but I'm not recalling them right off the bat... which is probably as good a reason as any to codify them as anything.  :)

Hedtke's Law: Something that doesn't offend somebody couldn't possibly interest anybody.

Comments: "Something" in this case can be almost anything: a person, an endeavor, an idea, a change to the way things are being done. I also must give credit where credit is due: I didn't come up with this, I merely expropriated it. My old friend Allyn Wolfe was actually responsible for this in an issue of Red Garters, the house organ of the NWC, in 1977. However, I have carried this forward and it's now been adopted (as Hedtke's Law) as an operating principle for the STC's Board of Directors. (I have more on the proper attribution of Hedtke's Law here.)

Hedtke's Law #2: If a job is not worth doing at all, it is certainly not worth doing well.

Hedtke's Law #3: Everything's funnier after midnight.

Hedtke's Law #4: All other things being equal, it will always cost more.

I don't have a lot more to say about this one except that things will always be more expensive than you thought. 

Hedtke's Laws #5, #6, #7, and #8 will be posted eventually when I recall them.  Probably next time I find myself spouting them, actually. (Addendum: I've now got Hedtke's Laws 5-7 up here.) Hedtke's Law #8, Hedtke's Law #9, and Hedtke's Law #10 are also posted, as is Hedtke's Law in Latin.

Since I am mentioning rules, I should also say that I am very fond of Magid's Law, which I named but did not create. It's named after one of founders of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, Paul Magid (who I had the pleasure of hanging out with at a party along with the other Karamazovs in 1977 after a Ren Faire thingie in Chico, CA). Paul said this during their Broadway Show in the early 80s and it's been a Deep and Profound Truth for project planning for me ever since:

It doesn't matter how you get there if you don't know where you're going.

I've quoted this in several of my books and, though I haven't had occasion to talk to Paul myself, a mutual friend did let him know before the first instance and said that he was fine with me naming it after him.

Addendum, July 5, 2010: I had occasion to chat with Paul Magid about this after a presentation he gave about the history of the Karamazovs at the Oregon Country Fair. That was nice!

For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

Hedtke's Laws

"Hedtke's Law" and proper attribution

I was off at the STC conference in Atlanta this past week. It was a lovely event and the photos I took can be found at my Flickr website. Two of my all-time favorite people got their Associate Fellow credentials and I got to see any number of other old friends as well.

At the Board meeting on Friday, no less than 4 people pointed out to me that "Hedtke's Law" (identified as such) had become part of Board canon. Hedtke's Law is something I kept saying while I was on the Board when dealing with people who are too 'nice' (the nose should wrinkle when you say it). 'Nice' is ineffectual, unable to do anything, because you're worried that someone, somewhere will be offended. You may be able to put a name and a face to that somebody, but the idea that SOMEBODY will be upset would completely prevent the STC from doing a lot of things in the past that should've been done to the betterment of the members or the Society as a whole. (And fuck that noise, btw.)

I have no patience for people who don't want to get anything done because they're in mortal fear of offending someone, when, in fact, they're there to get something done. When confronted with this ineffectual thinking--of which we had an awful lot at the time--I kept saying this:

"If it doesn't offend somebody, it couldn't possibly interest anybody."

I said it so often that this was dubbed "Hedtke's Law," and it's a very flattering legacy for getting the STC turned in the right direction. (There's a corollary to this, too: If you're the one offended, it's just your bad luck that this time it was you.)

But I really need to set the record straight on one point: I didn't write this. My old friend, Allyn Wolfe, was responsible for saying this some 35 years ago in the pages of Red Garters, a Craft magazine that he edited. (His editorial policy was, similarly, "I shall continue to provoke everyone within my reach!") It's a profoundly great statement and, although I'm getting the credit for saying it, I want it stated for the record that it was Allyn who came up with this in the first place.


For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

"Hedtke's Law" and proper attribution