Looking from the Wrong Direction

I'll spare the details, because database talk, like the jargon of all sorts of other specialties and cults, is boring to the uninitiated. But I had my wee little mind boggled a bit today. A few days ago, I was switched from a Mac to a PC at work. I only realized today that I had lost the useful tool of Applescript when a particular function in one of my databases no longer worked. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments as I lamented our short-sighted, conformist abandonment of the superior machine for the one that plays nicest with everybody else's. Now, I moaned, I'll have to spend hours trying to figure out how to get Windows to do what Mac did so easily. This would clearly cut into my blogging time. I was forlorn.

But after five minutes thought, and about half an hour of actual work, I got the database to accomplish the same thing, and the new solution works on both Mac and Windows. It's simple, it's elegant, it's cross-platform, and it takes advantage of a previously unnoticed side effect of an unrelated function. So, thirty-five minutes. It took me a day and a half to figure out the right syntax for the applescript I was previously using. Funny how I spent so much time staring at the problem from the direction from which I first approached it and never bothered to walk around the other side and see what it looked like from there until I was forced to by the cruel machinations of petty fate.