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August 25, 2005

As of this writing, I'm in room 3002 at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute with dextrose and IV tubes connected to the back of my hand. It's late and the TV doesn't have any interesting shows, no games on my laptop (drat!!), and no other form of entertainment, so I boringly stared at the little piece of plastic that connected the catheter inside my vein to the tube. I followed the tube up to the dextrose bottle, and again I boringly stared at the drippity drop of the fluid. And then I thought: these tiny pieces of equipment - if one of them fails, I'm dead (knock on wood). Each of those tiny little pieces of plastic had its own specific purpose - to connect the catheter to the tube, a valve to stop blood from going the wrong way, a y-tube to facilitate painless injections of medicine, a flexible tube that withstood biting (boredom surely makes you try weird things ...), a valve that acts on air pressure to keep bubbles out of the solution, a rate controlling knob to limit the amount of fluid that comes into my bloodstream, and may others. The whole thing would be called "dextrose" or "blood bag" by most people ("peripheral IV drip line" is the correct technical term). But would they know about the individual names of each of those components?

From this, I thought about the many things we know the name of the aggregate, and yet do not know the name of the individual parts (unless we are the repairman for that particular object). The television is composed of lots of resistors, transistors, electron guns, and other electronic stuff. An ordinary cabinet can be made of narra plywood, stainless steel nails, lacquer varnish, and a cherry stain. A program is made up of many subroutines and functions that are in itself mini programs that contain subroutines and functions. People tend to group things together by their function, and fail to realize that the object consists of separate little parts until the thing doesn't work anymore. The only people who really know which parts are which are the makers, repairmen, and people who study and research on the stuff.

I guess this would also apply to organizations. In a company, people get assigned to different departments like marketing, accounting, and finance. Most of the time, it is the departments that get the recognition; the people under the department simply are referred to as "the people." And like the peripheral IV drip line, the only people who (are supposed to) know about the individual parts are the medical equipment supplier or maker (those responsible for creating the department and which personnel gets assigned to it), the technicians or repairmen (consultants for HR), and the researchers (information-gathering