Pig Farmers and Diamond Miners

Last night I was thinking about how, at my previous job, I’d been pressed to provide a status on problems that were both more complicated than were assumed, and for which I was only tasked with a small portion.

A concrete example would be being asked when the website would be finished, when my assignment was to write the supporting code to communicate with the database and manage state (which is more complicated than one might think), and could not control how long it took the designers and copy editors to contribute their portions.

As I was drifting off to sleep I came up with a few quips that I might use when I encounter those sorts of questions in the future:

You’re asking a diamond miner for a wedding ring.

You’re asking a pig farmer for a BLT.