The fire could be seen for miles.
Of course, that was never the idea. But plans never survive from back room to real world. The chickens were a bit of a surprise. Our briefing material left out that detail. The girls seemed surprised to see us, but since they weren’t in the way, we just left them alone.
But the next steps led to our certain failure.
We had a widget that should have let us in. It did get us through the perimeter fence without visible alarm. But it didn’t have any effect on the locks on the barn. At that point, we should have simply aborted the mission. But the hens were squawking at being disturbed, and we didn’t want to just admit defeat.
If there is a lesson here, that is it. When your plans go so wrong that the landscape ahead of you is unrecognizable, stop. Don’t go on. Don’t just wing it. Do not follow our example.
We winged it.
We plowed on into the unknown.
That was when we discovered the grain silo was also a missile silo, that we hadn’t disabled any alarms after all, and that the whole world now wanted to kill us.
Oops.
The Creativity Oracle 