I am the demigod of Africa
First off, I'd like to thank God (the whole Earth is filled with his glory) for this promotion. I was just a Seraph, doing my normal PR work, but somehow God (holy, holy, holy and all that) noticed me and decided it was time to give me a bit more responsibility. Of course, being untested, he couldn't put me in charge of something as important as the US Senate or something like that, so he gave me Africa. After all, if I screw up there, who's going to notice? Naturally, I screwed up. I saw something wrong and I decided to fix it.
After my initial tour of Africa and the obligatory chastising of Robert Mugabe (who I've since learned is deaf), I decided that I should deal with problem areas which are not as susceptible to political manipulation. That's when I decided to eradicate sickle cell anaemia. This terrible genetic disease saps the strength of those afflicted with it and reduces their life expectancy by a couple of decades. It also provides support for the theory of evolution, thereby complicating the PR matters to which I previously attended.
Naturally, now that I have been promoted to demigod, I eliminated sickle cell anaemia with a Word. That, in my ignorance, was a mistake. As it turns out, malaria is still rampant in sub-Saharan Africa (they still have water, after all), and by curing people of this terrible disease, I left them vulnerable to an even worse disease: malaria, a disease which previously killed several million people a year, but whose death toll raised an order of magnitude after I "fixed" sickle cell anaemia.
Fortunately, God (holy, holy, holy) is all loving and forgiving. Once he remembered where Africa was, he let me off with a stern, but loving, dressing down.
I guess if there's any point to this, it's remembering that if you walk into a new situation, it's important to start with an "ears open, mouth shut" attitude and try to understand why something has arisen, rather than rush to judgment. I'm sure to get demoted back to Seraph if I forget this rule, but for now, I'm content to simply watch what is happening in Africa. But man, I really wish I could figure out how to deal with Mugabe.
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I don't get it.
@amiribarksdale.myopenid.com: it's a metaphor for a common thing which happens to developers at work. You walk into a new situation and decide to start fixing something which appears to be bad, but since you don't understand all of the ramifications, you make things worse.
It's really, really easy to walk into a project and start badmouthing it because you don't realize what it took to get it to that state. Were there technical limitations? Financial limitations? Time contraints? Bad programmers? Changing business requirements? Who knows? Changing something without fully understanding it is dangerous.
Classic.