My friend Simon talked with me, he would like to buy some instant coffee or ice cream in supermarket, but he found that, all of them including one ingredient is non-dairy creamer(植脂末). This ingredient is used to make the drink more smooth, it’s a replacement of milk, but it’s bad for human health. Any way, it’s better than melamine(三聚氰胺). Nowadays, you are hard to find instant coffee without non-dairy in China.

Another story what I heard there is a government department named as “temporary emergency processing center for cover of sewer well” (窨井盖临时应急处理中心) is hiring a fixed officer. And as government perspective view, this department will be always existed even the name including “temporary”, the reason is they have to alwyas handle the “temporary” & “emergency” issue. But as I know, the cover of sewer well shall be managed by municipal administration.

The third story is restrict the car to solve the traffic jam, i.e. if the last digit of your car license plate number is 1 or 9, your car will be ban on road on Monday, 2 or 8 will be ban on road on Tuesday, and so on…. This is a temporary solution for traffic jam issue, but currently, it’s becoming a final solution, it’s normal for administration department.

So we can understand from those stories, once problem happen, there will be temporary solution coming, in programming area, we called “workaround”, and there is no further analysis, and temporary solution will act as final solution, workaround will act as solution. Once there is another problem happen, there will be another temporary solution coming, or another “workaround” be used. A workaround helps to solve another workaround, and another workaround is used to solve another another workaround problem….

But why? I often ask this question to myself and my colleague. It might be caused by lazy, yes, that’s one reason. But another problem in government administration area, the temporary solution can solve some problems of employment, and there will be more position for officer ask, even it’s not needed. In software programming area as well, more workaround, more maintenance is needed, and more engineers are needed. But all of us forget one thing is find out the root cause, and fix it.

If exception has been normal, around of you use workaround solve another problem of workaround, it means the situation around of you has been worse, you need to consider quit only if you can solve it. :\