Current location:	1112 High St, Palo Alto, CA 94301 (my home)
Current mood:	mellow
Current music:	Mae - Were so Far Away
Entry tags:	culture, psychology

The art of working with broken systems
We get a lot of junk mail and mail for people who once lived here. Every couple of days or so one of my housemates empties the mailbox onto the dining table. Because we're all messy slobs the pile of unopened unimportant mail has been steadily growing. This is now a problem because it is pretty easy for one of us to miss an important piece of correspondence if it gets lost in the mess on the table. To avoid this I have attempted to get my housemates to deliver anything addressed to one of us by leaving it on the floor immediately outside our rooms. This way the mess on the table can grow unchecked without causing any immediate catastrophes.

In the real world™ we frequently encounter broken systems. It's not always feasible to fix them all immediately so we usually need to work with them to the best of our ability while they are being fixed. But it's important not to normalize the broken systems or they will never be fixed.