Past, present…Programming and…

Past, present…and future

If you took a moment and considered the grit, stamina and just plain old hard work it took to get where you are today, you’d probably underestimate those factors to the extreme.

On the other hand, if we’re thinking about the things that impeded our advancement and limited our successes, we’re likely to exaggerate them in our minds. Both tendencies are natural and not at all surprising.

But if we can dig a little deeper and ask how we might have gotten further and experienced fewer setbacks – or avoided even the outright failures, we might discover something quite useful.

What if we’d applied more effort to acquire that one core skill that we now realize we really didn’t really master? Yep, success might have come earlier and probably more easily, had we done so.

Looking forward from today’s vantage point, the question is what are the skills or tools that would ensure faster (and bigger) successes tomorrow if we master them now.

If that skills inventory checklist identifies just one weakness we can address, the payoff might be outsized and the effort we need to make shoring it up probably less arduous than we think.

Programming and…the tempering curve

When we’re designing a wash formula from scratch, we know there are almost endless possibilities in the cycle variations that might be needed.

To deal with that organic material embedded in bed sheets of that nursing facility we might start with a cold flush. If it’s a load of poolside towels where suntan lotion residue is an issue, maybe a warm flush starts it out.

But regardless of the complexities of that formula we know that temperatures are best arrived at in stages. If we’re starting with a cold flush, then maybe another short split flush might be best before we move to a hot suds cycle. And if there’s a bleach cycle that’s going to be separate from the suds cycle, it’ll be hot as well.

And that first rinse, (and perhaps the second one as well) will be hot to keep the fabric’s weave open for optimum rinsing. Moving forward we’ll almost certainly transition to a split temperature in the final rinse. That’s to both maintain that smooth temperature curve and to eliminate complaints from the folks pulling a load of uncomfortably hot fabrics