When has your tomorrow become today because you just couldn’t wait? Stress can do that to you. Stress makes you believe that everything has to happen right now.
As an example, there is nothing wrong with companies selling more and faster, but often mistakes are made when they do not weigh the risks of a faster turnaround against releasing a product on schedule. I recall a time when my company couldn’t wait for tomorrow and nearly cost our customer hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales due to a reckless and hasty decision. It was as the cliché goes – “egg on your face”.
I was the Quality Assurance Manager of that small software company. I was always thorough in testing a product for release, but sometimes there was the pressure to make a product release sooner than the planned release date. Best case scenario was that we would just have to work longer hours and weekends to get the job done, but it would be at least tested. The worst case scenario case was that we would release a product that was not thoroughly tested, and that could bring the customer’s systems to a crashing halt, as in the following case.
Worst case scenario – I received an urgent call from our customer when I came into work one morning. Unbeknownst to me, a software enhancement request had been fast-tracked “out the door” for a minor bug fix, sooner than the next planned release date. I was not kept in the loop, and as it was prematurely released without my knowledge of or testing of it, I was in a quandary as to why their computer systems were down.
Stress levels, as you can imagine, were very high, so I logged on remotely to the customer’s database to diagnose the reason for the system crash. My mind was whirling. Was it my fault that their systems were down? It had also crossed my mind that it may not have been my fault, which perhaps the customer had not provided me with a complete set of test data for running successful tests in-house. In either case, we would have to work overtime until the problem was fixed.
After testing remotely, I could not reproduce the reported problem. “What release are you running?” I asked. They replied, “product release 51”. “No, that cannot be correct. Please check again”. The customer checked again, and repeated, “Release 51”. Again I thought, that could not be correct. “Your last product release was 50”.
Because of the dire emergency of their systems being down, I now had to escalate the problem and involve our Vice President. Seemingly embarrassed, he said, “Oh, I released the product to them last night. I didn’t think that a simple bug fix would be a problem. ”
Fortunately, we were able to back out the bad release and restore the last good release so that the customer’s system was back up and running.
Whatever the negatives of not having a new product release over having an emergency release, a risk assessment should have been made to decide if the risk of releasing it sooner outweighed the risk of having it later.
“What good has impatience ever brought? It has only served as the mother of mistakes and the father of irritation.” ― Steve Maraboli
Similarly, when we are tossed and perplexed with doubts about what God is doing in our lives, we must watch against the temptation to be impatient. When we have poured out our requests to God over and over, stop to listen to his word and spirit about what he should say to us, for much trouble in life is because we don’t wait upon God to answer our hurry up prayers. In turn, we fail to receive God’s blessing because we are not moving forward with Him.
Don’t try to control destiny by making tomorrow happen today. “If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place.” (Habakkuk 2:3, NLT).
Copyright 2016 by Bill Hutzel
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