Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
I have a digital padlock that has managed to reset itself in a sequence that is definitely not the one I set for it. Hence it is unusable. I phoned the manufacturer in the hope of finding some quick fix but no! The solution is to find the new code and reset it. As the women pointed out, there are only 999 combinations.
I know that the only real way to find the code is to start at 001 and work systematically through to 999. Hopefully the code will be somewhat short of 999 so I may only have to do 500 or 600 combinations. But my inclination is to not be systematic, too boring and too daunting, but try and guess the combination around about the old one. The logic being that it can’t have reset itself by very much! So I wasted two days, randomly selecting numbers around the old code before finally facing the inevitable truth that I would have to start at 001 and end at 999 or somewhere before 999 when the code actually worked.
I am now at 500, half-way.
Why did I waste my time trying to short-cut the process when logic and a systematic approach would have yielded faster results? I can’t explain, but there is something non-linear in my brain that makes sense of the world by jumping off all over the place and not plodding through.
It reflects the way I learn, the way I read books, the way I deal with the world. Those of you who are systematic will be despairing at the illogicality of it all, but I hope some of you are sympathetic.
What this taught me, is that this is the way I am. I should accept it. And some of my random choices could have worked after all: there was a 1 in 999 probability! And jobs that require systematic, tedious procedures are probably not for me. I will get the right combination eventually but my natural inclination is, even after 500 attempts, to throw the wretched padlock in the bin and buy a new one.