It’s been one of those “busy-slow” weeks. I get these sometimes when I’m consulting. On one hand I’m busy, but work is slow. What do I mean? Well Monday I was on a train all day (literally other than a 1.5 hours layover in NYC) coming back from Atlanta. That’s another story but suffice to say, I wasn’t much in the mood to get work done. Tuesday, when I generally write this blog, I had a couple of customer meetings and was busy, and then the rest of the day busy with non-client work. Same with Wednesday and Thursday.

Finally today, I had a few minutes to catch up on some stuff. I FINALLY took the time to look at one of the tabs I had open in my browser. Admit it, you do it too. “Oh look, that’s cool I want to read/watch/listen to that, but not now, I’ll just keep that tab open.” And then weeks later you’re like, “what is this tab?”

In this case it was a video post by Grant Fritchey on “Why friends don’t let friends upgrade to SQL 2014.”  I was curious about this because at a client I had to recently upgrade two servers to SQL Server 2014. I had preferred SQL Server 2016 or 2017, but the 3rd party software vendor said “no”.  Fortunately nothing bad has happened, but, it’s posts like Grant’s that I appreciate because it helps broaden my knowledge base.

One thing that makes humans incredible is our ability of language and ultimately our ability to create forms of communication that transcend time.  None of us can learn EVERYTHING. But what we can learn is who knows more than we do, or how to access that information. If I want information on query tuning, I’m going to ask Grant or pick up one of his books. If I have a question on Power BI, I might reach out to Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman or Cathrine Wilhelmsen. In other words, I don’t need to be an expert on everything, though I’d like to be! I just need to know who to reach out to.

Similarly with my cave rescue world. I’m proud to say I work with some of the greatest people in the world, people who literally have written the book on cave rescue. And yet, at our recent meeting (the reason I was down South), two of my colleagues, Roger Mortimer and Eddy Cartaya reported back on their trip to Europe where they attended the ICARS conference and brought back some great information on how the Europeans are doing some things differently when it comes to cave rescue. This has prompted some discussion between Roger and myself on some medical topics.  Again, none of us are the complete expert on the field, but we know enough to know what we know and don’t know and how to learn more.

So, keep those tabs open and keep adding to them. I know I’ve got at least one video on air plane accidents I need to listen to when I get 30+ minutes. What tabs do you have open?