Growing

After 8 years of maintenance practice, I am quite familiar with pump repair, transformer inspection, alignment, vibration analysis and so on. However, off and on we got some "special" cases. Once we are ask to look into grass that fail to grow.

Our customer have huge area of reserve land for future expansion, it is well plant with "high grade" grasses and run with automatic watering system. 6 months after the system running, one small section of the grass fail to grow and turn into brown under the hot sun. We are summoned to look into the watering system as a token of appreciation for our "major" customer.

As the result is obvious to tell us which pipeline is not functioning, the work done without any exciting moment. The only memorable moment is the prediction statement from my manager that this small section of grass that are brown now will be best grown on this piece of land. He explain that the watering system will provide more than enough water to the grass and the root will never grow deep enough for the natural nutrient in the soil. Unlike the rest, these poor brown grasses have to grow their root deep down for the pass few weeks to survive without the watering system. Year passes, I can still identify this wonderful section easily as it is always in green for the whole year. They really stay strong as predicted.

I don't really want to be a grass specialist but it is a moral lesson. You can link it with topic like walk out from comfort zone, high peak low peak of life cycle, what doesn't kill you make you stronger, courage to fail and so on. For me, it remind me to respect the sequence of nature, set your goal but don't over plan everything, the only exception is always lubricate machine on-time.