{"id":1080,"date":"2026-10-11T10:18:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T17:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/?p=1080"},"modified":"2026-10-21T10:46:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T17:46:14","slug":"16-months-and-no-resolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/2026\/10\/16-months-and-no-resolution\/","title":{"rendered":"16 months and no resolution&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"We had a standard ruggedized field laptop for all worksite staff. It could take a beating, including sitting all day in a closed truck cab in Arizona in the middle of summer. Every jobsite with an office had a high-gain wifi antenna covering the site, extending the LAN over VPN to on-site staff.<br \/><br \/>Solid setup. Worked for everyone. Until we brought in a new field lead.<br \/><br \/>He seemed fine at his job. But we could not get him to use the computer. He wanted a tablet. That would be the trick to get him compliant with his paperwork.<br \/><br \/>So I secured a tablet version of the same ruggedized line.<br \/><br \/>Nope. He needed a stylus.<br \/><br \/>Got him a stylus. He lost it. And now the tablet was too bulky.<br \/><br \/>So we went a different direction entirely. My team built web-based integrations that let him do his submission work from his phone. The device already in his pocket.<br \/><br \/>He used it for a few weeks. Then stopped.<br \/><br \/>So I got him one of the lighter tablets we issued to office workers.<br \/><br \/>No. It needed to be an Apple tablet. That&#8217;s what all the other trades were using.<br \/><br \/>We were a Windows shop. Not out of preference. We&#8217;d done a full assessment before moving to tablet-based computing and the cost-benefit balance landed us on Surface Pros. They did what we needed at the right price.<br \/><br \/>I asked him what exactly he was going to run on an Apple tablet that he couldn&#8217;t do on any standard system we had. Everything he used was a web-based portal.<br \/><br \/>That moved to a conversation with one of the company owners, who was going to have to justify the $1,400 expense for what looked like a fit-in-with-my-peers demand.<br \/><br \/>I&#8217;m a platform-agnostic guy. If the tool does the job, that&#8217;s the tool. But $1,400 for a new system when we had hardware that exceeded requirements and was already integrated into our infrastructure? That&#8217;s a different problem.<br \/><br \/>He swore that this time, for real, for sure, if we just got him that Apple tablet, he would miraculously become compliant with his paperwork.<br \/><br \/>The result: marginal improvement. Never really compliant. Separated from the company four months later. The company was left holding hardware nobody needed on a payment contract.<br \/><br \/>Each individual ask sounded reasonable. Tablet. Stylus. Lighter form factor. Different brand. But stacked together they told a different story (and the phone integration said it all for me). We committed engineering hours to put the work on the device he was already carrying and it didn&#8217;t solve the real problem&#8230; but I needed to demonstrate good faith accommodation of the request with ownership. It wasn&#8217;t wasted effort though as the rest of the team benefited from the updates.<br \/><br \/>Sigh&#8230;<br \/><br \/>I fully support adapting to meet the needs of your staff. But there has to be a point where you say: this is the line. When the demands are clearly a way to put off doing the work, every concession just buys a few weeks of silence&#8230; never the actual compliance.<br \/><br \/>The diagnostic isn&#8217;t in any single request. It&#8217;s in the pattern.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We had a standard ruggedized field laptop for all worksite staff. It could take a beating, including sitting all day in a closed truck cab in Arizona in the middle of summer. Every jobsite with an office had a high-gain wifi antenna covering the site, extending the LAN over VPN to on-site staff. Solid setup. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259,12,111],"tags":[287,258,289,288,290],"class_list":["post-1080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-construction-rant","category-general","category-unloading","tag-bad-faith","tag-construction","tag-excuses","tag-resolution","tag-standards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kitchencloset.com\/home\/bryan\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}