There’s a saying that changed my life as a programmer:
YAGNI: You ain’t gonna need it
It’s the antidote to perfectionism. YAGNI comes from the observation that we are very bad at predicting the needs of the future. Adopting YAGNI changed how I code. I also try to apply that to decluttering my life. But every now and then, something you have held on to for years actually does come in handy.
When I was a kid, I had a fascination with the idea of lockpicking. Probably not an uncommon fixation for people who obsessed with learning how things work.
In college, I ordered a pick set and some locks. I learned the basics, but ultimately was much more interested in partying than picking locks. I don’t know if I ever picked a single lock before relegating my equipment to my knick knack bin.
20 years later, I was doing bedtime for our 4 kids, at the time, all aged 5-and-under. Every night somehow ended up with 4 sleeping children, but the path to get there looked very different night-by-night. In those days, every bedtime felt like an achievement. (Still does, sometimes.)
On one particular night, my son was out of pocket. He was probably just under 2 years old. I separated him from the other kids and set him up on the floor of my bedroom. He was pitching a holy fit and it was all I could do to get him to stay in the room. When I was in there, he was screaming at me and not relaxing, so I probably thought, if I move to the hallway, out of sight, perhaps he’ll calm himself down.
He pushed the door closed and then promptly locked it. I don’t think he actually knew what locking the door was. He just did it on pure instinct. What followed was about 2 minutes of me trying to instruct a belligerent toddler how to turn the little tab to unlock the door. Pretty quickly, he gave up, laid down, and immediately fell asleep. I could not wake him.
So now, I’m panicking. I can’t leave this baby locked in the room. We were renting the house, and for some reason, they had put an entry door knob on, with a keyed lock, not one of those privacy knobs you can do with a paperclip. I frantically searched for the proper key, but none of the ones they had left seemed to work.
I desperately wanted to solve this problem before my wife became aware of it. It would also be great to avoid having to call a locksmith or the fire department.
Then I remembered, my keepsake bin was in my office!
Inside it were my lockpicks, which hadn’t seen the light of day in a couple decades.
I still remembered the theory of how to pick a lock. You use the tension wrench to apply some torque to the cylinder, and then you use a pick to individually push the pins until they catch on the edge of the cylinder. This is what the teeth on a key do, but when you use a lockpick, you have to use trial and error to know how much to push each pin. Because you can’t really see into the lock, you have to do it all by feel.
After about a half hour, I succeeded! The only problem was that I had pushed the tension wrench the wrong way, so I had picked my way into locking the door from the outside :facepalm:. But no matter, I had at least proven I could do it. It probably took 10 more minutes to pick it again with the tension applied in the correct direction.
The door opened, I scooped up my soundly sleeping, angelic-looking son and transferred him to his bed.
Finally, I could tell my wife what happened from the perspective of having already solved the problem.
I’m still all-in on YAGNI. But just this one time, my clutter bailed me out.
Never Down, Always Up 