UP IN SMOKE

Everyone knows about unintended consequences. 

The Butterfly Effect, the law of rotten outcomes, the Snafu rule.

In design – that is, in the making of new things – this is a persistent factor we must keep in mind.  We do our best to see projects through to the ideal end but we always have to consider unexpected twists and turns.  Learning this as a habit of thought is one of the things that turns students of design into true practitioners.  Blind faith is not a helpful trait and that is why worriers tend to make good designers.  I speak from experience.

The notorious cigar story is a good parable to keep in mind here, whether it is true or not.

As reported in the news several years ago, a man in North Carolina bought a box of very rare and expensive cigars.  He took care to care for them, including insuring them against fire.  Within a month he had smoked all 24 of these fine cigars and had not even made his first premium payment on the policy.  At this point, a brilliant idea occurred to him.  He filed a claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, he stated that the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires."  The insurance company naturally refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in exactly the way you would expect, by smoking them himself.  Small fires, indeed.  Yet the man then sued the insurance company...and won the case!

In giving his ruling, the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous but said that, even so, the language of the policy was too vague on this point.  The man in fact held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire.  But because the policy did not define precisely what an "unacceptable fire” was, the judge stated that they were obligated to pay the claim. 

Rather than go through a long and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the man for his loss of the rare cigars in the “fires.”

Ah, but once the man cashed his check, the insurance company turned the tables on him   They had him arrested…on 24 counts of arson!  Using his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case against him, the company won the day.  The man was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property – a form of arson – and sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

Moral for all designers:  Think it through.  Just because the plan sounds good to you from the start does not mean that it is a good plan in the end.