[mylastattempt]

Agreed on this being a painful read. Starting with this being a 10 minute job. Based on what? Assumptions are the.. etc. You assumed everthing was plug&play ready. Who told you that?

Anyway, after the second trip, before going on a third, he still didn't think to actually check the complete 'requirements' for his trip to the hardware store. You buy a part for your drill, but don't check if it will fit your drill? Why not bring the drill and then take a picture of the job site, if you are going to ask the people at the store for help anyway.

It's like downloading a compiler, write lot's of code in Python and then being annoyed it's a C++ compiler or whatever. Same for the "not actually extendable hose". Maybe call the wife, or just buy the hose and return it if you don't need it on another trip to the hardware store later that day or week when you pass there. Just painful, no planning or thinking.

The only thing I can imagine just being domain knowledge, is that the spigot needed a hole to be drilled eventhough it has an inlet which I would also assume was open.

[kelnos]

I think it was somewhat reasonable for the author to assume it would be a 10-minute job when it had been that way in the previous places he lived. Realizing that a brand-new house might be "unfinished" in some ways is something you might not know if you've only lived in places where there was a previous owner that took care of all the unfinished bits.

But I agree that once the author realized he needed to go to the hardware store a second time, he should have gone through the motions of pre-checking every step he'd need to perform so he could see what else wasn't right.

[DannyBee]

"I think it was somewhat reasonable for the author to assume it would be a 10-minute job when it had been that way in the previous places he lived."

I don't - in all of those, the author knew someone else had done the work for them.

It's like always having had scaffolding built for you, and then when you have to do it from scratch, assuming the scaffolding required zero time and zero knowledge to build, and being surprised when it doesn't.

Here's a fun thing that most software developers never do that works, and would have also worked here: He could have asked.

"Hey random internet people, i'm about to install a washer in my new home. All of my previous homes i was not the first owner, but here I am. What do i need to think about here?"

A quick search shows lots of people have asked on reddit and get correct answers for their situations. I don't see one where they got bad advice.

Heck, even chatgpt gets this right: https://chatgpt.com/share/67b482dd-25c0-8008-b0be-6b1f97648a...

The fact that software developers assume it's reasonable to not bother to seek knowledge when you know the situation has changed says more about software development than it does about reasonability :)

[randallsquared]

> You assumed everthing was plug&play ready. Who told you that?

Eight previous iterations of experience told them that.

[DannyBee]

Because someone else had done the work for them.

They knew nobody else had done it for them here the second they hit a single issue.

Why not step back at that point and try to understand the entire problem you may be facing?

This like people who build software by just fixing one bug they see at a time by trying to make the compiler happy or whatever, instead of stepping back and thinking about the system as a whole - what other assumptions are likely wrong if you had this bug?

Worse, here there was a very easy solution: Ask questions before you start.

Just because it's common for software developers to not bother to ask people for knowledge they don't have doesn't mean it's a good answer.