Last night, after dinner was completed, we took all the dishes and got them ready for the dishwasher and started up the cycle. Nothing new. Just something that we had done 15,000 times (or more) before. When we had our twins, we doubled the pleasure (truthfully) and doubled the number of times per day to change diapers. I counted back then (I AM a nerd and a geek, of course) but I cannot quite remember the number of times. Probably 8,000 changes of diapers total for the twins and another 4,000 for their older brother. When I first started changing diapers, I was sometimes not quite fast enough and got surprises that I later had to clean up -- but by the end of that 12,000th diaper, I could do it in the dark, while balancing a bowl of grapes on my head, and keep the surrounding area as clean as it was before I started. "Practice makes perfect."
Back when I was doing the laundry for the whole family (five or six in the household at a time), I would have to do laundry (usually only one washer load) three times a week -- over 1,000 loads per year. Now that the children do (or don't do -- up to them) their own laundry, I am only doing a load per week (normally, when I clean the sheets there is an extra load) so a third of that. Note that I am not (well, I am mentioning it) counting preparation of meals because each meal is a bit different. The meal has different ingredients and takes a different amount of time and goes through different processes. There have been a LOT of meals prepared but they aren't, strictly speaking, a repetition.
These repetitions are a natural set of results from life processes. You eat, you have to clean up afterwards (even if it is just burying the bones and the ashes). Digestion involves a series of events that cannot be avoided while you are living. Clothes, and the need to wash them, are needed in colder climates and socially required in others. I am sure that many have the occasional thought (as I do) that this must be a punishment of some sort. Old Sisyphus and his endless pushing the boulder up the side of the mountain comes to mind. But it probably is NOT a punishment.
Sometimes I think of the cartoon series "The Jetsons". To have Rosie clean up after all the messes. It doesn't reduce them, it just means that someone/something does it for you.
Which leads to the work side of this blog (it is not too surprising that most topics have a work side as well as a personal side since life -- like the geographical planet -- has no real borders). I have done some work in an area that Google calls "Site Reliability Maintenance" (SRM). I also took a Coursera course in an introduction to the Google-explicit SRM. When problems occur (and they do occur -- the goal is to reduce them, recognizing that they can never be eliminated), fix them quickly, fix them well, and reduce the possibility of the same problem happening in the future. There are lots of statistical formulas in conjunction with different approaches and followups.
One thing that comes up is that if a problem occurs "frequently" -- even if that frequency is still within Reliability Objectives limits -- then it should be investigated to see if there may be some way to have it handled more quickly or easily in the future. Ideally, this would mean the problem is addressed "automatically" where the recovery process is triggered and the steps are done without further intervention by humans. (It still counts as an interruption in service.) Less ideally, but still an improvement, special tools can be developed to allow humans to address the problem more quickly.
As long as life continues, certain events will continue to happen. The world will rotate and the sun will appear over the horizon. Food will be eaten and the aftermath will need to be taken care of. Networks and services will have hiccups. And it's all to the good because it is an indication that life IS continuing.
