follow up and follow through are hard tasks to accomplish in any organization.
Since before I've been here, there has been one outstanding technical issue we have not been able to solve.
In a village, lives a translation assistant. A papua new guinea man who understands some English. He sits at a radio which is connected via modem to his laptop, he types in a number on his radio handset "sel call" and it dials a radio here, and then the two modems begin to talk and email is transferred.
This man has been unable to get the communication working to get email, which means all of his work has been sitting on the laptop hard drive and not sent here, which means one crash could wipe out months of work.
We get 15 minutes every other day to solve this with him over the HF radio. The computer guys gave it a go for weeks and weeks,... no progress.
We asked everything under the sun, and finally said, "it HAS to be a radio issue"
and we called in the radio guys.
THEY spent hours and hours over weeks and weeks with them.
All hope was diminishing quickly then today, one of the radio techs came in and said,
"well team, we solved it!!" and sure enough, we monitored the call and email was working.
The solution:
-The man in the village was calling the wrong number. He was calling himself.
It's a silly solution, but not one single one of us thought to ask the question first "what number are you dialing?"
He was very simply dialing the number on his handset, which rather than indicating the number he should dial, was indicating the number he was should someone want to dial him. Because technically the dialing is not a computer thing, the computer guys didn't ask it, and because it's not quite a radio thing, the radio guys didn't ask it until finally someone said, "okay, walk me through from the very beginning" a question we had asked repeatedly.... something about his answer sparked someone to ask 'and what number are you dialing?'.
It was the equivalent of someone saying "everytime I dial my own number I get a busy signal".
We chuckled for a moment at the simplicity of it, but soon realized the irony that it took several of us, so long to solve the problem because of all the communication issues in the way.
Sometimes, in fact most times, finding the solution is all about asking the right question.
Maybe I will add to my daily prayers, the God give me the right questions.
No matter how smart you feel you are at what you do, sometimes something very simple comes along and humbles you.
