Hitchhiker’s Guide to Analytics — The Rain God
Documentation is key
Rob McKenna is miserable, and he knows it. Mostly because he’s had a lot of people point it out to him over the years. He sees no reason to disagree with them except the obvious, which is that he likes to disagree with people, especially the people he dislikes. That group includes, at last count, everyone.
Rob isn’t naturally predisposed to be miserable. At least, he hopes not. It’s just the rain that gets him down. Always the rain.
It’s raining on him now, just for a change.
Rob McKenna is a valuable, if miserable, lesson in domain knowledge and in the need for documentation.
Rain
Rob McKenna knows rain. He know better, perhaps, than any other human being in existence.
He drives for “McKenna’s All-Weather Haulage”, a name which you might be inclined to consider humorously ironic but is, in fact, merely incorrect. Mostly because Rob is the only driver, and it is always raining when and where he drives.
I suppose “One-Weather-Always-Bloody-Raining-Haulage” turns away customers and is notoriously difficult to fit on the side of a lorry in any lettering that can be read from a distance.
All Rob knows is that his working days are miserable, and he has had a succession of lousy and wet holidays.
All the clouds know is that they love him and want to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.
Unbeknownst to him (but knownst to us), Rob McKenna is a Rain God.
Know your domain
Rob McKenna had heard, at some point, that people who lived in snowy climates had over a hundred words for snow. Driving snow. Feathery snow. Snow that makes really good snowballs to throw at your friends so they will hate you, at least until they get you back with a ball they’ve packed into ice.
Rob did not have the imagination necessary to create two hundred words for different types of rain, but he became very proficient at distinguishing between different types of rain all the same.
Rob McKenna has two hundred and thirty one types of rain documented in his little book, and he did not like any of them.
He was, however, very meticulous about tracking when and where each of them fell.
Stand by the facts
Rob McKenna was known at every diner and every pub along the highways he drove for his hauling company. Every pub and diner along the way had a table or booth they called “Thundercloud Corner”, and nobody sat there but Rob.
One rainy day, a new customer came into one of these pubs and found himself sitting across from a soaked and miserable lorry driver.
The customer on this particular day was Arthur Dent, who had seen much of the galaxy by this point (the fourth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy).
A few minutes into the conversation, Arthur began to think he had seen quite enough without hearing this miserable sod complain about rain in England.
Their conversation, which was mostly very dull and involved unnecessary thumping on tables, ended like this…
“It rains … all … the time,” Rob raved, thumping the table in time to his words.
Arthur shook his head. “Stupid to say it rains all the time,” he said.
Rob countered, quite logically in his mind, “Stupid? Why’s it stupid? Why’s it stupid to say it rains all the time if it rains all the time?”
I’ll spare you the rest of it so that we can skip to the point.
Documentation
Rob conceded that no one took him seriously and mocked him endlessly, but he also pointed out that his wife always takes in the washing when he’s on his way home.
“I have a book. A diary. Kept it for fifteen years. Shows every single place I’ve ever been. Every day. And also what the weather was like.
“And it was uniformly horrible. All over England, Scotland, Wales, I been.
“All round the Continent, Italy, Germany, back and forth to Denmark, been to Yugoslavia.
“It’s all marked in and charted. Even when I went to visit my brother in Seattle.”
And Arthur Dent gave the best advice he ever gave in his entire existence…
“Maybe you should show it to someone.”
“I will,” said Rob McKenna.
And he did.
Verification
Of course, Rob McKenna was widely ridiculed when news of his rain journal first became known.
Then people started checking. His driving schedule. Dates. Weather reports. All kinds of people in lab coats with respectable degrees flew from around the world to discuss him and measure him and perform some number of tests on him that told them nothing a quick look out the window couldn’t confirm.
It all checked out. Every last entry. Everywhere he went, it rained.
Rob McKenna became moderately famous. Interviews. Articles. Talk shows.
He also became respectably wealthy. No one asked him to visit drought regions (although I like to think he would, at some point). And maybe he did.
In the meantime, he was paid enormous amounts of money by tour operators and resort owners to stay away.
Determination
What can we learn from this?
Document everything. I know I could have just said that, and you’ve heard it before, but seriously. Document everything.
If Rob had just kept saying, “Look! It’s raining on me!”, no one would care. They’d just run inside and tell him to leave them alone.
But Rob had data. Data that couldn’t be repeated, exactly, but could be confirmed from independent sources. It was auditable. It was consistent.
Rob McKenna demonstrated best practices in Documentation and Data Governance. Not because he liked data, but because he hated rain just that much.
Sad, really. He’ll never know how much the clouds love him.
We can also learn not to limit the practical uses of our data. People will always find some use you didn’t expect, and don’t be surprised if it is less noble or exciting than what you had in mind. Just roll with it.
And, finally, we can remember never to go on holiday with Rob McKenna. Unless you want a holiday in the rain, in which case, he’s your man.
Just take an umbrella.
For more improbable yet relevant lessons from the Hitchhiker’s Guide…
