Who's the expert?

December 21, 2008
by Rodney Olsen
7 Comments

As I was wandering around the web a short while ago I followed a link to a website design site.

Now, I’m sure that you can tell that while this blog is ‘OK’ to look at, I’m no design expert. There are many things I wish I could do which would go well beyond just hacking a template until I get something close to what I want. Never the less I’m relatively happy with what I’ve done.

The interesting thing was that the website design site was truly awful. Here was someone offering their services at a considerable hourly rate and even to the untrained eye their own site is cramped, the colours don’t really work and it certainly didn’t inspire me to want to use their services. They are offering to review other sites and give feedback on improvements for just $150. Imagine that – $150 just to look at your site and then they’ll tell you how much they’ll charge you to fix the problems they see. I can give them a review of their own site for nothing. I don’t think they’re trying to rip anyone off, they simply have a very high opinion of their very average skills.

I wonder how many times we believe that someone is an expert just because they tell us that they are. How many times do we think they must know what they’re doing because they’re charging professional rates? I’m not just talking website design here. There are so many areas of life where people present themselves as someone who knows what they’re talking about when in reality they haven’t got a clue. How do we decide what’s good and what’s bad if it’s not our area of expertise?

How do you decide on which service or professional to use when you need to someone to provide skills you don’t have? How do you know what’s good and what’s not? How do you choose a mechanic when you really have no idea what goes on under the bonnet of your car? How do you decide on a family doctor when the most medical training you’ve ever had is how to apply a band-aid?



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I just want to be normal

December 20, 2007
by Rodney Olsen
3 Comments

Most of us aspire to something beyond ‘normal’.

There’s a sense in which normal is equated with average or boring so a lot of the time we shun the idea of being simply normal. Yesterday afternoon I was more than happy to be normal.

A couple of days ago I dropped into a pathology clinic for a blood test. I’m never keen to have sharp metal spikes driven into my arms but I put up with it when necessary. The test was simply to check for a number of things such as cholesterol levels, diabetes and a few other bits and pieces.

I visited my doctor for the results and a check up yesterday afternoon and apart from a cholesterol level which is on the border of being high, everything was ‘normal’. In fact, when the doctor got to my Prostate Specific Antigen test he said it was ‘very normal’. With a history of prostate cancer in my family I was more than pleased to hear that my readings are very good in that area.

Most of the time I want to be more than normal but sometimes normal is the most wonderful word of all.



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