Professional Only Misconstructions

Have you ever walked into a house and thought, “something doesn’t feel right”? Or maybe you’re reading an article and you come to a sentence that you can’t get past, but you can’t put your finger on why? Maybe it’s not even visual. You hear music and something sounds off, but you don’t know what it is?

I call these “Professional Only Misconstructions.” or “POMS”

These are things that, to the untrained eye (or ear), simply feel odd, but to the trained professional, are clear misconstructions.

I became much more aware of these after working construction and drafting some design plans for houses. In construction, there are codes and rules for everything. How far a 10ft 2×4 can span while supporting a floor, how wide a hallway going to bedrooms must be, which ways doors into certain rooms must open. Even stuff down to how far away the toilet must be from the wall or how deep a closet must be if it is a certain width.

These are all things that someone who is designing and/or building houses has to think about when figuring out how to build. If they don’t, these “POMS” begin to happen.

Let me give you an example: Have you ever been walking up a set of stairs, and all of a sudden, you trip up the last step? You probably think you’re clumsy, and you’re just thankful that you didn’t also fall down the stairs. However, what you might not know, is that the last 20 people who went up those stairs before you also tripped on the last step. Is everyone just lazy when it comes to the last step of these particular stairs, or is there more to it?

When building stairs, you have very specific margins that you must hold to. If you don’t, you end up with situations like the one above. Let me give you a couple of crude drawings of what this might look like:

These are the stairs you tripped up. Our legs are trained for stairs. We don’t even have to look at them. They’re just habit. But if your legs are trained to go up stairs that are the same and all of a sudden one is three inches taller, your legs weren’t prepared for this, thus resulting in a trip.

That is why there are professional codes for what is allowed on stairs like these. I won’t go into all the boring code details, but this is what those stairs might have looked like if they had been done to code:

This is a very simple analogy, but I think it helps us to understand what these POMS might look like.

You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it.

When you’re a professional, or highly skilled in an area, you start to see mistakes related to that area that other people either don’t think about or they simply thought “felt odd.” I can’t tell you how many times I walk into a house now and cringe at the lack of quality work put into it. But to those who don’t know construction, they are ignorantly bliss.

As a professional, your goal should not only be to create something that your average guy on the street thinks is well done, but something that your fellow professionals think is well done.

Don’t meet expectations for slow Joe, exceed expectations for CEO Joe.

Don’t underwhelm resident Vincent, overwhelm president Vincent.

In conclusion:

Don’t cut corners by creating POMS.