Pancakes and Syrup

“My love of maple syrup. I’ve been known to knock back a can over a couple days: A swig here, a swig there, and next thing you know it’s gone. It’s a habit I have to stave off. I don’t want to lose all my teeth.”
Rufus Wainwright

Pancakes and Syrup

In the World of Warcraft there is a mini-game called Raiding. A group of players enter a special zone and try to defeat a boss. This encounter is specifically designed and unique, it is common for a raid to have twelve different kinds of bosses.

When facing this boss for the first time, teams will likely fail. They have to learn the fight. Lots of things are involved like movement, power phases, big healings at specific moments and so on. Eventually everyone learns how to do the fight. Eventually after a while, players are so powerful that the encounter is trivial.

Players, when powerful, often want to skip the mechanics learned and prefer to blow up the boss. Many will do things on purpose to force the issues upon others. I call it “pancakes without syrup”. I prefer to do the learned dance in the most precise way possible, therein is my satisfaction. We want to enjoy our encounters and show off how well we play. Still, very many shrug it off and flaunt their power. Who cares?

Of course, this parallels real life. For me, the point of pancakes is the syrup. Which means … if I am writing a memo to my boss that I’ll carefully word it and double-check everything because it is important. And it also means that if I write a memo to someone below me in the chain that I’ll take the same effort.

Respect the process and you will respect the world around you. I know, people will shrug and say that it is just the janitor. I completely feel that this guy deserves as much respect as my boss. It completes the dish. Serving up pancakes with no syrup is almost an insult! Because we have power does not mean we should skip the mechanics.

Here is the way to eat pancakes. Order a stack of three. Take a fork and push it right down the middle of the stack and twirl your fork making a hole right down to the core. Then pour the syrup into the hole slowly so that it can soak all three pancakes. Think volcano. Now, eat your eggs and bacon. Having done the soaking duty, the hole in your pancake stack is empty; reload.

Now you can enjoy your pancakes and syrup!