Perfection or Maybe Not

You Don’t have to be Perfect, Just Good Enough

There are quite a few of us in the world, myself included, who occasionally suffer from perfectionism. In most situations, striving for perfection is a good thing. I want the pecans that you, my valuable customer, receive to be perfect. I want the trees to be pruned and irrigated and harvested at the perfect time. As is usually the case in life, I can get to “pretty good” but rarely get to “perfect.”
This perfectionism also applies to farm machinery and repairs. We’d love to have exactly the right part, available at exactly the moment when we need it and have all the tools necessary right at hand. Occasionally all these things come together but mostly not. This year at harvest, as we were finishing our very last rows, the steering on the harvester started to go out. The culprit was a broken bolt. We didn’t have anything close to what we needed to make the repair. The sun was going down and there was rain in the next day’s forecast so stopping was not really an option. Time to get creative. We fashioned a “bolt” out of a pair of channel lock pliers. Our repair wasn’t perfect but it was good enough. We finished harvest and had a good laugh about our ingenuity.

Channel locks for the win!