The Test Point I Never Built

The first night of our first family camping trip, a thunderstorm sat on us for forty minutes. We had pitched the tent in a low spot without knowing it was a low spot. By the time the rain stopped, the floor felt like a waterbed. You could push down on it and watch the ripple travel to the far corner.

Nothing got in. Not a drop. The tent did its job, and by morning the water under us had drained off and you would not have known.

We were at Hammonasset, the state campground in Madison, a walk from the beach. Nella learned to ride her bike. Lina took a corner too tight, slid out, and skinned her knee and her elbow on the pavement, and an hour later she was back on it without anybody asking her to be. They rode for hours. We flew kites. Rosanna had never camped in her life and got through three days in a tent without once suggesting we go home. It was a good three days.

And the whole time, in the back of my head: Thursday.

Two new guys were starting Thursday. I had told myself this would be the one where I was ready. Compass is the competency platform I built into LabHQ, where a technician's training lives: what they have been signed off on, what they are working toward, who verified it and when. For an accredited lab that record is not optional, and I have been keeping it in spreadsheets for years. It was supposed to be running before these two walked in the door. I had a general idea of what their first two weeks looked like. I was also winging it, which is what I say every time.

Wednesday night I set an alarm for 3am. Got to the office in the dark and started closing gaps. At 4:30 an email came in from one of the two, thanking me for the opportunity and letting me know he had taken another position.

Gut shot. We spent a long time getting to those two, and I wanted them together. Two guys starting at square one on the same day teach each other. One asks the question the other did not think to ask, and they both get the answer. I lose that now. I train Josip, and whenever I find the second guy I start over and train him one on one, the long way, and it costs me the same weeks twice.

I opened a chat window and told Claude what had happened. It went into the hiring tools I built into LabHQ and pulled him out. Candidate record, stage history, all of it. I never opened the app. Four minutes, and most of that was me typing. I built those tools to move people forward through the process, and it never occurred to me while I was building them that the same tools would be how somebody comes back out.

When the guys came in I told them what happened, and then I went and onboarded Josip, because he was here and he was starting. Day one, Compass was not ready. I pivoted him onto the old spreadsheet, the one Compass is supposed to replace. It worked fine. It has been working fine the whole time.

Every system I built to watch myself is reading green. The Monday Top 3 went out. The daily wraps are logged. The week has objectives and the objectives have outcomes recorded against them. Nothing on any board I own says there is a problem.

And I feel like I am scraping by in every direction at once. Not failing. Not succeeding either. Seventy percent in the business, seventy percent at home, seventy percent on my own protocol, and not one of them broken badly enough to go after.

I am good at the fire. A complaint comes in and I open a corrective action and drive it to close, and I know what that looks like and I know when it is finished. There is no fire in this. There is just load.

My diet is the tell. It is the only thing I do that nobody else can see. Chris notices if a work order slips. An auditor will notice if a document is uncontrolled. Nobody emails me about what I ate at ten o'clock on a Saturday. So it is the first thing that goes, and it has gone, and I keep reaching for the word self-control because that is the cheap explanation.

Everything I said I would do that week got done. The trip happened. Josip started. The work went out the door. And at no point did I feel like I had succeeded at any of it.

A calibration only tells you about the points you checked. You pick the test points, you take the readings, and everything in between is an assumption you decided you were comfortable making. Every point I picked for myself is passing.

What I want to measure is whether anything is finished, and I never built a test point for that, because I am not sure I have ever hit it. Compass is not done. LabHQ is not done. The quality system is not done. I am not done. Some of that is the nature of the work and I know it. I want it finished anyway, and I do not think that wanting is going anywhere.

The tent held. That was the test point I picked. There were three inches of water under the floor all night and I slept on it without knowing.