More competing sayings

No worm for this guy

About six years ago, I wrote about how old sayings can be contradictory but people will quote them as if there is no other option. I wrote about this in my post titled "Look before you leap" or "He who hesitates is lost"?. As I said then, you can't run your life by these sayings but it's fun to tie them in with what you've just done. Somehow, it makes taking the action you just took seem as if it is the action people have preferred for hundreds of years. In the case of contradicting sayings, you can't go wrong!

I just ran into another saying that puts these two ideas into one sentence:

The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.

This is poignant and funny at the same time. I hate the image of one mouse lying dead in a mouse trap while another mouse takes the bait. But it makes you think. Would the early bird start so early if he thought he was heading into a a trap?

I ran into this myself at work. The programming language we use for our products was recently updated. Now, normally, I'm the slow, deliberate guy who waits for a while to see how things are trending before I take action. But this time, I decided to be the early bird. I wasn't going to hesitate and lose. I updated the tools we use to create the programs we sell. I'm in charge of doing the daily builds of our product (that means, I compile everyone's work into a working program, create installers for the various platforms and make it available on the network for all the developers and testers - every day for testing). So, the decisions I make affect everyone in the software group.

Not two days after I made this decision and did the updating, I found out that there is a problem with printing introduced with this version of the programming language! I should have looked before I leapt. I found myself in the trap with the cheese out of reach. The sad part is that it was an uncharacteristic action for me. It's time to trot out another old saying, "Live and learn." Now I know it is better to procrastinate.