The Rules

No, not the Rules of the Road… I’m talking about the real rules that govern the day to day lives of sailors.

Most of you have some idea what I am talking about even if you have never put names to them. Every sailor I know, for instance, has some selected multiplier he or she uses when estimating the time and cost a given boat project will take over and above what you think it will take. Mine is four; on land I usually just double it, but a boat project I think will take about an hour and cost fifty bucks, I mentally re-adjust to a hundred dollars and four hours spread out over two days (the extra day is because the hardware store will be closed when you realize you need that extra part).

So project time is one rule. Project scheduling involves another. It’s the natural inclination to consider the boat projects one has on hand (quadrupling the time/cost estimates as above, of course), the amount of time and money one has available, and planning to complete the projects accordingly. But you would be failing to take into account the Law of Unexpected Projects, and will quickly find yourself committed to more projects than you have time available to complete.

We ran into something like that this week after drawing up a lengthy lists of the projects we would like to get done this month. We had just enough time to squeeze in the most important ones… and then the galley sink faucet started dripping. And the head sprung a leak. Suddenly, we are two projects over our limit, and they’re not minor little things that you really want to put off, either.

So my new rule will be, schedule only half the available time to the projects you know about. The second half will get filled up soon enough with all the extras you weren’t expecting.

There are also some complex interpersonal rules to do with boat projects. One is the rule of inadvertent assistance. Often, Mandy and I will have our own separate projects to work on, either due to space requirements (there are a lot of places where it isn’t really practical for two people to be working on things at the same time) or particular aptitudes (she gets all the stuff that requires intricate maneuvers in tight spaces; I end up with all the brute force stuff). We’ll then schedule these according to our own convenience, while the other may have work or something else to do.

But the rule of inadvertent assistance says that regardless of what the plan was, eventually both of us will end up having to work on most projects, even when it’s inconvenient to do so. The galley sink faucet was a case in point. Mandy generally does plumbing, and I had other work to do, so I arranged to be out of the way while she worked on it. But little by little, things kept coming up that required my assistance or intervention. Eventually, I found myself soaked, swearing, and contorted beneath the sink, fully engaged in something I’d never planned to get involved with.

That conclusion is similar to one mandated by another rule, the rule of unintentional assistance. That’s where you’re watching someone else work on a project that you have nothing to do with, but find yourself offering “helpful” hints and suggestions, eventually picking up a tool or holding a flashlight, and toward the end, taking over the job completely to see it through to the bitter end. You just can’t help yourself.

When I was a kid, a particularly heavy snow fall brought out all the children in the neighborhood for that great communal ritual of building a massive snowman. The inevitable snowball fight broke out, and someone thought to construct rudimentary snow fortifications for protection. The adults of the neighborhood were of course watching all this, and as we got into the construction phase they started offering tips… make blocks, stack them offset, make the base wider, and so on. Then they started to lend a hand to show us what they meant, and pretty soon out come the snow shovels and while the kids were all back to the snowmen, a full-fledged igloo took shape. That’s unintentional assistance.

I keep wishing one of those guys would wander past my boat when I’m tearing my head apart and would unintentionally take over for me.