Alright, so folks sometimes ask me about my “prairie dunes ranking.” And let me tell you, it’s probably not what you’re picturing. We’re not talking about hitting a little white ball across perfectly manicured grass, wondering which course has the best greens. Nope. My list, if you can call it that, is a bit more… gritty, you could say. It’s born from experience, the kind that sticks with you.
It all comes from this one particular stretch in my career, a good while back. I was working on this massive project, a real beast. From a distance, management thought it looked simple, like those vast, windswept prairie plains you see in photos. Looked easy to cross, right? But once we got into it, man, it was full of hidden dips, sudden rises, and patches of really soft sand. We even started calling it ‘Project Sandtrap’ amongst ourselves for a while, and for good reason. It just had that feel of something that looked straightforward but would suck you in.
I didn’t actually sit down and formally write out a ranking, you know. It wasn’t like I had a clipboard and was giving scores. It just sort of built up in my head. You see enough things go sideways, witness enough common sense just pack up and leave the building, and you naturally start keeping a mental tally. It was my way of processing the whole mess, trying to make some sense of the chaos. So, if I had to point to what really made that project, my personal ‘prairie dunes,’ so darn memorable, a few key things definitely jump out.
My Unofficial Project Sandtrap ‘Highlights’
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The ‘It Looks Flat on the Map’ Fallacy: We kicked things off with this plan. Oh boy, was it optimistic. I remember seeing the initial presentations. Everyone nodded along, “Yeah, looks clear. This will be a stroll.” The problem was, the map they showed us didn’t highlight the quicksand pits. Or the sudden, blinding dust storms of changing requirements. We burned through the first few months just figuring out that our initial map was pretty much a piece of wishful thinking.
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Constantly Shifting Goalposts (or Dunes, I guess): This was a big one. Just when we felt like we’d finally climbed one dune, got a handle on one section of the project, someone from way up high would decide, “Actually, that dune needs to be over there now.” Or, “It needs to be a totally different shape.” Sometimes, it wasn’t even a dune anymore; suddenly, it was supposed to be a water feature. We were basically trying to build something solid on sand, and the sand itself kept getting shoveled around by indecision. Talk about making you want to pull your hair out.
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The ‘More Features are Always Better’ Mirage: This one nearly did us in. The project was already a sprawling thing, like trying to find your way through a maze of identical-looking dunes in the fading light. But then, almost every other week, some new “brilliant idea” for another feature would just materialize. “Hey, can we also make it do this?” “And what about adding that nifty little thing?” It felt like we were already sinking, and they just kept handing us more heavy stuff to carry. Each new feature was another shovel of sand on top of us.
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Tool Trouble in the Middle of Nowhere: We were promised the best tools for this “expedition,” the latest and greatest software, all the support we’d need. Turns out, half the fancy tools didn’t work as advertised, especially not together. And the other half? Nobody had really been trained to use them properly under pressure. So there we were, out in our metaphorical prairie, trying to construct something complex with what felt like toy hammers and plastic spoons. We spent so much time fighting our tools instead of the actual problems.
How come I remember all this stuff so vividly, you ask? Well, because I was right there in the thick of it. I was one of the folks with a plastic spoon, digging away, trying to make headway. We’d have these marathon meetings, staring at whiteboards, just trying to figure out which direction was forward anymore. Drank a lot of stale coffee in those days, and did a lot of head-scratching. You don’t just forget experiences like that. They get etched in.
So yeah, that’s my “prairie dunes ranking” for you. It’s not about the prettiest golf courses or the lowest scores. It’s my personal ranking of the biggest headaches, the most “are you actually serious?” moments from that whole crazy adventure. It taught me a heck of a lot, though. Mostly, it taught me that when someone describes a big project as a simple, flat prairie, you better pack for the dunes. And maybe, just maybe, bring your own heavy-duty shovel, because you’re probably gonna need it.
