Borrowed Trouble

One of the things I notice these days when reading books is the repetition verbal tic that some authors develop. In Deathless Divide, the word "burble" stood out in its repeated use. In Peace Talks, the phrase "don't borrow trouble" showed up at least three times that I recall. Okay, yes, just looked up the count, three times: twice as "don't borrow trouble" and once as "You already have enough trouble without borrowing more." One has to wonder what is going on in Butcher's life when he wrote the book that the phrase was stuck in his head, coming out in his words.

Likely because of recency bias, the phrase is stuck in my head, too. As I'm working on a project, trying to fix 15 bug reports so that I can move onto another project which, despite having three months to work on it, I am woefully far behind on, I am becoming increasingly annoyed at other developers who are "well, what about this?" to details that are fine as is, do not cause any harm, do not cause any confusion, aren't required, but are nice to have, and no one outside of this person cares about now becoming my problem because they asked, "well, what about this?" Which is to say, that particular nice to have is now f---ing annoying to have because it is fine as is, and there are another 8 tasks actually more important, but no, because they won't let this ONE THING GO, those 8 lose out because that developer borrowed trouble.

How many developer hours are lost because of this "well, what about this?" which happens to be additional accessibility text that is not harmful, just not required by the spec? Well, we're currently at two, one of them being an hour of my life that I can't get back, for something that JUST DOES NOT MATTER.

This rant, on the other hand, totally matters.